Abolition
by rese
Summary: The rest of the story around 'middles' and 'lovers' in One Hundred. Warning adult themes and content.
1. Chapter 1

**Abolition**

_A/N: I do not own anything recognisable – it's all Louisa May Alcott's._

_**Warning for sexual content and adult themes**__. I'm not leaving anything central to the relationship in this 'verse out. Also, though I don't want to ruin the plot anyone who has a problem reading about sex, adultery, euthanasia, abortion or suicide should probably steer clear of this one – I'm not saying they're going to be in here but it's a precaution so you don't get mad later. Sorry! This is definitely an adult fic kiddies._

_Takes up after 'middles' and from moments between 'lovers' in _One Hundred_. Sorry some of it will be rehashed but you guys seemed to give positive responses to these two chapters and it's hell fun to write._

…

They will not be missed, he convinces himself, holding Jo's hand as they skirt towards the edge of the room, ignorant to the smiling faces around them. Her face is very serious but he believes well enough that he can read her like he can see the back of his hand. He gives one last look to the room filled with dancing couples and minglers and the last very best bash his grandfather will hold. They will not be missed.

Laurie steps into the hall and Jo is not far behind. He looks for interlopers and finding none turns to her, his eyes slipping easily to the unprecedented view her new dress affords him. He has never seen so much uncovered flesh on Jo in decent society and it has reduced him to a silence he hasn't held since the day in the field.

She must know what she does to him, Laurie decides as he watches her evade his gaze, hands behind her back. Jo must know for she chose to wear such a dress. He moves to stand over her, infinitely pleased to hear her take a breath at his proximity. His hands brush the oddly shaped bodice fit of the dress and just for a second her eyes close and he knows she is his for the night. She hasn't spoken five words to him since that day in the field but it is in the way she leaves her neck bare, invites him with lowered lashes in a practice she has never performed.

It is then he realises she is not coy or shy but worried. Her eyes are scanning the curtain and her breath is shallow as she watches and waits. If she wants to be interrupted, wants a stop to this she need only speak – she knows how to undo him in the worst and best of ways. Laurie lifts a hand to her cheek and there! she turns her face into his palm. Her hand grips his tight to her cheek and she presses the fiercest of brief kisses to it that it only takes a moment more before he swoops down and captures her lips, the feeling sweet if a little desperate behind the curtain of an unwitting audience.

When they pull apart he knows he cannot disguise the hunger in his eyes. He has been waiting too long. Laurie steps toward her and she steps back, heading to the support of the wall he knows he will press her against. Her skirt feels like the sheets he shares with Amy and Laurie quickly finds himself putting that comparison out of his head by kissing Jo again, her cheek, her lips when she pulls his head down properly and captures him in her narrow hands.

He feels like every villain in every book Jo ever recommended and he can't say a part of him isn't thrilled by it. Laurie's heart is racing and his blood is simmering at the sight and feel of this strange and ridiculous dress that has turned Jo into something he never knew and yet recognises all the same. He wants her, has the moment he saw her enter from the foyer, the moment he woke that morning, the moment she left him in that god-awful, god-sent field he won't stop dreaming about.

Why did she pick this dress if not to encourage him? His lips lift from hers and in his thoughts he is unsure. Does she want him? Or is she simply submitting because he won't have it any other way? Did it matter?

"Why –" he begins but Jo shakes her head and he finds the question swallowed in a seemingly endless pile of things-they-will-never-say and so he puts it aside and directs his attention to the pertinence of her breasts. They are pressed high and puffed full with each shaky breath Jo takes and he frankly thinks this is the best part of such a gown. Her hand sneaks into his hair and he feels totally surrendered to her as the blunt edges of her nails scrape the sensitive skin of his nape. He feels as though there is not enough air and sympathises when it is obvious Jo can barely breathe for all the tightness of her dress.

That, he thinks, can be helped. Laurie bends, lifting a hand under the weight of her dress heading for the waistband of her underclothes – he doubts many might be under such heavy material, but women's clothing has often mystified him as the people wearing it. He wants to touch more bare skin, the softness he knows to be there, under all those layers but her net is stubbornly in the way and he frowns, unable to reach through. An attempt to unhook – hooks thank the Lord, no belt - the pesky thing fails resulting in Jo's twisted mouth and a shove he thinks is a little out-of-order.

Frowning at her he watches as she moves off the wall heading to where he has no idea. She holds out her hand and he takes it without a thought and soon she is leading them down the corridor, through the foyer and to a side room he'd forgotten about. Laurie steps through the door, looking about the narrow library as he hears Jo close the door behind them. The lock clicks shut and the tiny noise fills the long room. He turns to find her leaning against the door, the angular strips of light falling across her dress from the window at the opposite end. The moon was brighter than he realised, he thought approaching her as though they had all the time in the world. It was never enough. Never would be.

"The library?" he asks quietly, hoping she will take his hands soon and he can feel like there is only them and nothing outside this old, old room.

An old look crosses her face which ironically makes her seem so very young. Jo pushes off the door and his heart is beating a little faster as she nears. "Really," she chastises and he almost imagines them seventeen, without husbands and wives and eyes only for college and the future. "Didn't know your memory had gotten so terrible, Teddy." His heart has caught up with her calling him 'Teddy' and he closes the short distance between the two of them.

He takes her hands from where they rest habitually behind her back and smiles, feeling a little goofy when his forehead knocks against hers, needing to be closer yet. "You don't know what it does to me to hear you call me that, Jo."

A small smile of her own almost spreads before she uses those lips to kiss him into silence and he submits with great enthusiasm. He feels as if he owes the world to those lips, even if they were the very same that sent him away, sent them apart, they brought them back together again and right at that very moment he wanted nothing more than what they offered.

Jo however, had other plans and the feel of her thumbs as they hooked around his belt made him grin like a lunatic against her mouth. This is only the second time, he reminds himself, don't be hasty. But she has stepped into him and her hands have untucked the tails of his shirt and she feels so impossibly warm for someone dressed so… so…

Laurie's mind was politely excused and he tears his lips from hers to kiss her neck, sucking softly at the skin not long enough to leave a mark before his hands find all the catches they can. The top-half of Jo's dress is soon loose and within two moments more she has divested him of jacket, waistcoat and shirt before turning her attention to the hassle of the crinoline. He briefly watches in bafflement, running a hand through the back of his hair in thought before wisely thinking of his trousers and dropping them in time to find Jo almost-naked and waiting.

Her hands are on her arms and she looks more nervous than the time she'd told him about the crystal vase she broke. Laurie steps swiftly to her and kisses her as reassuringly as he knows how. Jo groans appreciatively and when her hands run down his back he can not help the shiver that follows in their wake.

Hurriedly he lifts her and in two steps she is pressed into the bookcase, sighing into his mouth as he feels unashamedly hard at the sounds she is making. Jo's hands are gripping him tight and she moves her hips in the slowest of twists he actually grunts.

"Quickly," she gasps when he kisses her chin, her jaw, one hand supporting them against the bookcase in this precarious position, the other boldly fondling a breast that has spilled over the short corset Jo is stuck wearing. He nods in answer and knocks her legs firmly apart with one of his own, feeling as ready as they need to be fast. She runs one hand down his throat, down fast, the skimming feeling of her nail sending his hairs on-end with delight before she fists him in two sharp tugs. Laurie's eyes almost roll back into his head and he accidentally pinches her breast harder than he intended before moving that same hand to Jo's folds.

Jo's eyes flutter shut and he wordlessly marvels at the expression of pleasure on her face as his fingers dance intimately in and out, tugging one way then the next. He swirls as delicately as possible in their place before she is moaning, head lolling backwards onto books that have not been read in years. He pulls out of her, thumb swiping her nipple absently before he suckles on the same spot with vigour, wanting to know just what she tastes like. Jo bucks, her hand pulling him tight at once and he finds it hard to continue, suddenly unable to breathe.

He wishes they did not have to be as quick as they must but he straightens and with great strength, holds Jo up as he pushes and she squirms onto him, pulling his hair as her hand falls on her breast and he hastens their tempo. It is fast and not a little angry and Jo is gasping and he is pistoning and it isn't enough that she wouldn't speak to him and he wants her every waking, every dreaming moment of his life and he can't get enough and he wants he wants he –

Laurie finds it over in a blinding flash and he feels better than he has in weeks and Jo is still atop. He slides his hand to the front of their join without hesitation and she twitches and he smooths and her arms are so tight around his neck before her whole body is jelly and they are sliding down from the bookshelf, wrapped in each other as deadweight.

"I forgot how that feels," she whispers to him. They have silently agreed to give each other a moment before they dress and rejoin the party.

"You've had sex on bookcases and you haven't told me?" he asks, unable and unwanting to hide his smirk. Jo punches him tiredly in the arm and feels that what they have just done must have been for their seventeen-year-old-selves.

"You know what I mean."

"Better than anyone else," Laurie mumbles into her hair, her beautiful hair which has become mussed and largely unfixable. Stories will have to be invented for this time, he thinks, slightly pleased and terrified at the connotations of that.

Jo is the first to get up, wiping a thumb under her eyes when she thinks he isn't looking. She finds her clothes and the skin between her thighs is thick. It takes only a minute more for him, kneeling before her, to kiss the slick away, making sure she knows the taste of them on his tongue before they leave the room to find their families and dance with lemonade.

…

It is night and it is dark and dark is good for thoughts such as those which Laurie entertained of late. He has grown use to the lack of light, he has known sorrow and he has known what it has felt like to be a boy and now to stand as a man.

Anything he feels he has achieved since that horrible day in the grove so many years ago feels shallow and cold and Laurie stands at his window, looking up the road to where he knows it is a good walk to Plumfield and where Jo is sleeping in another man's bed. He tries not to think of Amy, whose soft breathing is like the sound of crickets in summer, just the background noise to his life. His life, he thinks is falling apart.

There is nothing he can do to stop it. There is nothing he wants to do to stop it.

He will be with Jo.

…

He is thinking about how many layers of petticoats she is wearing today when she smiles at him and hugs Amy. Laurie flatters himself he does not let his thoughts show at the best of times and when it is their turn to embrace he does it as any brother should. Any brother who is anything but and thinking of nothing more than licking the underside of her throat, wondering if sweat would pool in the dip of her stomach if he tried her long enough with his hands. With his mouth. He is cool and collected and chats about cricket with practiced ease as the professor enlists his help with the day's equipment.

He smiles congenially and is sure to keep Jo in his sights as they stride across the grassy field with children running as wild as they can. He is wondering if she would like to lie on her belly in this grass and let him kiss her back or lower –

"Teddy!" Jo calls out and he smiles inwardly at her innate ability to reign in his immorality at the best of times. "Over here! The table should go here," she directs him and he smiles for her when he has put the bulky item down on the grass. She smiles back but it is tightly reigned in as soon as she feels the presence of the others.

Surely, he thinks, a smile is harmless. But Jo is setting out the plates of food and unstacking the glasses and he is determined to be her shadow for the day if she will do nothing but watch their audience. Laurie's fingers brush hers over the potato salad and she hastily pulls back looking quickly for Amy who is obliviously lying out a rug for her and Marmee to sit. Laurie frowns at her when she looks back, red down her neck into the very high collar she is wearing. Dull grey he notes blandly when her look sharpens into a glare.

Laurie busies himself with the glasses as she clutches the pitcher looking for a fight. He knows what she wants to say and he will not have it.

…

It's somewhere between dusk and dawn that his hands fall upon her hips and they continue what dreams present when he closes his eyes at night, another's small white hand resting on his chest. He steps in close enough to feel Jo's breath fall against his neck and he thinks it smells of honey and milk and bread and he knows home before he feels it. She lets him kiss her, and that in itself should be enough but they both know it never is.

Laurie pushes her back, till she is against one of the kitchen chairs and the very real danger of the housemaid she keeps in this enormity of a house catching them at it makes his kiss only stronger, his hands hungry and wild as she bends to better reach him. Jo's thumbs hook around the edge of his collar and he feels with startling reality the scrape of her thumbnails as she tugs him down, the difference in height filling in lines of frustration across her brow. He loves her for it, knows that with all his being, he would love her for everything. It is a frightening, damning thought.

"Bedroom," he whispers when they break apart for breath. Jo nods quickly, though she will not meet his eyes as she takes his hand and they climb the grand staircase without sound. She holds open the door to a room he has not visited but recognises as a study. Jo closes the door before he can ask anything and her hands are on his throat, down his waistcoat and in his pockets and he thinks nothing of this change in plans. Laurie steps into her, kisses the spot above her right eye and wraps his arms around her for they have always belonged there.

Jo is not content to be simply held however and Laurie soon finds the routine of stripping each other as enjoyable as every other unbidden, hopeless time. He wonders quietly why he did not see this earlier, that she would submit to this spiralling immorality but he will not question it in the genuine fear that all of this might disappear as quickly and unexpected as it had begun. Unexpected yes, but, he thought, watching Jo pop the last button in her blouse, the soft cotton slipping off her long thin arms to the ground, not nearly unwanted. It wasn't as if he hadn't thought of it, not when his wife pressed her small mouth to his, not when she smiled under the scattered light of her parasol, and certainly not when she'd rolled over and watched him in afterglow. Jo, he thinks is so fundamentally different, and so originally his.

She smiles one of those long, wicked smiles that he has only ever seen when stealing cooling pies and in the more daring moments of sex and he can't help but grin back. Her foot rises to press against his thigh as an open invitation as she reaches for the clasps behind her back. Laurie's brow rises, knowing written all over his face before his hands snake up the length of her leg, brushing against the tender spots before he reaches the flush of her hip and she is almost laughing. A life of responsibility, sensibleness and living up to expectations set long ago upon him did not, he decides, prepare him for this. And, he thinks, laughing when she loops her arms about his neck and arches a very impatient brow as her lips give her away, he is okay with that.

"Well?" Jo asks and it is all he can do not to drag them to the floor. Instead Laurie's fingers dance under the lighter layers of her skirt. She has only worn two petticoats today and his fingers itch to see how much quicker it is to divest her of summer clothes. All in good time, he tells himself, stalling Jo's put-on agitation with a kiss to her temple as he leads them closer to the conspicuous couch. His fingers slip under the band to her undercoats and he pulls them down, falling to his knees under the unsubtle approach. She grins at him, hands on his shoulders as she steps out of the pile of underthings at her feet. His hands skim back up her legs, her hips to dance under the belt of her skirt. It is as high as fashion dictates for the modest woman and he is a little surprised by the complexity of fastenings on the outside of the material. With Jo, simplicity is rarely a familiar adjective but he knows her taste in clothes and the skirt, just for a half of a second reminds him of his wife and he stares as his hands hesitate to slip out and remove the garment.

He thinks Jo has noticed though neither says anything and he helps her unhook the form-fitting part of the skirt. When her hands move back to his hair he tugs the heavy material down, over her slim hips to pool at her feet. The troublesome article is forgotten as she leans forward to capture his lips and his eyes fall shut, trying hard to memorise this kiss along with his slowly expanding collection. He wants to never forget a moment he shares with her in the privacy of this affair for every moment spins them closer to its end; he knows it though his heart beats in the heat of it. He knows it though he will deny it to her every time she asks, and ask Jo will for she is nothing but pragmatic and would rather be lied to than live for the finish. He knows it because he knows her.

Laurie undresses without tease or method but with a silly grin across his lips as Jo attempts to keep touching him whenever he pauses to reach for his next piece of clothing. He considers how unfair it is that so much time, _their_ time, should be spent in the hassle of dressing and navigating fashion codes for layers and buttons and collars are all well and good until haste comes into play. Finally free of his shirt his arms reach for Jo and he finds her sitting already on the sofa, a look somewhere between peace and the waver of a sinner flashing across her face. He quickly kisses her, running hands warmed with movement and the day down her back to the dip above her bottom. She tilts her head to accommodate him and soon they are lying akimbo to the scratchy velvet that smooths opposite to their limbs.

His body is too big for the ordinary sofa and he find himself hanging awkwardly over Jo as she adjusts to their position, fitting her arms around his torso though his legs bend uncomfortably. She lifts her head from the base cushion and kisses him, her thin lips hot like soft wax and discomfort is soon replaced with pleasure as she pulls her legs under her and they are kneeling, Jo on her haunches as her hands cup his jaw and his her hips. Soon she is leaning over him and he lets her crawl onto his very naked lap, heart swelling at the leap of initiative, Jo's hands going to the arm of the chair behind him, gripping tight as they kiss without restraint.

Jo's eyes are closed as are Laurie's though he would know her from every other woman even if blindness took him. His hands are now familiar with every inch of her long planes, softened with the womanhood he had missed changing, desperate and hanging as he was a sea over and drowning his broken heart. He should have waited; he thinks now, his hands on her breasts as her knees hook around him. He should have waited and they would not have to swallow these lies.

A hand slides smoothly along his spine to the spot between his shoulder blades and he knows this is his cue. His lips break from Jo's to travel down her jaw, across her throat to suck above her breast before they duck lower and he tastes what boyish fantasies had made nothing like the real thing. Her nipple is tight in his mouth and he enjoys the deep, throaty moan he coaxes, the hand fisted in his hair. His fingers find the other pointed rise on her left breast and he wishes he always knew what this felt like – that if he should twist it lightly to the study door she would clinch him tight and whisper his name so huskily that he felt blood rise.

She shifts a little against him and they both realise just how quickly this might all be over. Jo's short nails find the back of his neck and he wonders how she can be so careful when her hips are squeezing him like that. He bites a little and she lowers herself and Laurie is all momentary sensation, that point that throbs just for Jo burning at the contact as his own hips move forward of their own accord.

"Mmm," she mumbles, hands running their way down his back to creep forward over his stomach. His breath is lost at the feeling of her fingers across his stomach and he pulls away from her chest to stop his head from spinning but only succeeds so that his head is resting in the crook of her shoulder. Jo's hands are travelling lower and he prays that he has strength for this – then she takes him in hand, soft at first before she is as merciless as she is at play-directing, her whole hand wrapped tightly in short powerful strokes that are his whole world of feeling. He chokes into the tendrils of hair that have long-slipped-out of her net and it is then that he realises where her other hand has gone.

"Jo," he manages, slipping a finger along with hers into her fire-heat enjoying the effect her immediate gasp has on the hand that still has his flesh encompassed. She is powerful like this and he never doubted she would learn how to deliberate her sexuality as she had every other aspect of her life. Amy was commanding and controlling – in good-natured spirits though it was meant and taken but Jo, Jo was strong-willed, wild and her own person and he never wanted it any other way. She could point a finger and he would know what she meant. And a finger she did point, he smiles against her neck, moving his hand in slow tandem with her own as she stretches and attunes.

Finally she releases him and Laurie supposes from the shaking of her hand as it moves to grip his shoulder when he kisses her that she is near and ready. He shuffles closer, legs slipping under her as her hips position themselves around his own and he presses one hand to her breasts, the other teasing her wet folds. Laurie feels as though everything is singing to him, each prickling spike of heat that shoots straight out to that point that aches is screaming that this is right, is what he had waited for the moment he met her, half his life ago.

"God Jo," he keeps his voice low, just as her hips slide down to meet his in the delicious first-touch, his hand still skirting between them. "I've known you half my life," he says, repeating his thoughts for her. "And now…"

She rocks against him, pulling herself up and quickly back down as he meets her, each achingly deliberate thrust after the other. "And now?" Jo's voice is pitched as low as his although the fog in her eyes and its airy distraction does not fool him.

"Now I _know_ you."

Jo leans forward to kiss him, continuing each motion as blood pounds through his ears and movement become messy and faster - his body feeling like a tightly-wound spring. He watches as Jo's eyes fall shut and her head tilts to the side as it always has, the tension in her face unbearably mirrored in his own as his hands clamp down on her hips and his thrusts are shorter and sharper and her shoulders are loose and her lip is between her teeth and he can't take it anymore and his finger flick at her one last time and she is falling onto him and he can't –

Laurie spills up into her feeling as though everything is burning and fire and white and hot until he is breathing again and his legs lay as flat as the sofa allows. Jo's face is pressed against his neck. Her hand keeps her there and he is _happy_.

Dressing and reality and marriage will come soon enough, but he is holding Jo and she isn't crying.


	2. Chapter 2

_A/N: I feel that in a lot of my fics that I don't give Amy enough credit. So here I am trying to make amends for that. Mariagoner, thank you so much for your review – you are feeding my soul._

Amy lets the filmy lace of the curtain fall loose and she steps away, smoothing the front of her skirt. Her face will be composed when he enters, a smile that she has only begun to recognise this last month across his face. She will, of course, smile back and then conversation will flow as it always has between them, meaningless and frivolous. A private joy they have always shared nonetheless.

It won't be hard not to think of him in this strange new light. The difference in his step when he comes back from Plumfield, always that older smile twitching across his face as it had when he was seventeen and Jo had agreed to take him skating or they ran off to play jacks alone – she will not think of it, for ignorance, they say, is bliss and Amy wants only to know of happy things. Frivolous could not hurt anyone and she takes some comfort in that thought, her restless hands finally stilling at her side.

There are happier things she can also think of if his eyes flick to the wall instead of hers. There is a secret she keeps nestled deep inside her, one that has surpassed many of the other small ones she has kept to be her own person. To feel that Amy March is still alive and painting her own world lest Amy Laurence be consumed in the routine and quiet emptiness of her devoted life. It is this secret that will keep the smile genuine on her face as Laurie rambles on about the many disappointments in a confining office space compared to the wild nature of a spruce tree or other such nonsense. She knows what he wants, what he yearns for when he looks out the window of his study, pen listless in his hand as he writes figures and dates in long thin columns but Amy knows also that she cannot give it to him. He has become what he has made himself and she knows her part in it.

So she convinces herself that happiness, no matter what the cause, is the key to this happy marriage and a stable life. It stops her from crying when the doorknob turns and Laurie enters the room, that predicted smile already on his face, his eyes not quite meeting hers. He crosses the room and takes her hands, kissing her on the cheek in a habitual manner that tells her he doesn't really mean it. Not the way he did when he first came back to her La Tour. Vevay, she laments, seems so very far away.

"- and so I suspect the roast will burn and the poor Professor will be left with charcoaled lamb for tea tonight." Laurie finishes and Amy looks up in disbelief that she has missed the first half. She reprimands herself for letting her thoughts carry on when her husband has been speaking; for everything he says she knows she should find important.

"Poor Jo never could cook," Amy adds as Laurie sits in the chair by the window and smiles distractedly, his hand already on his chin.

She watches him a moment, the strong line of his jaw in the dying afternoon so perfect in his bonny profile that she feels a shot of pride. He is _her_ husband, no matter what she fears when he strides across the yard or when his eyes look out the room as they did just now. Amy is content with the world they have both created for herself and her secret keeps her smiling.

"Would you like roast for supper too?" she asks, thinking with satisfaction that she suits the role of his wife so well. Her sister, she knows would never think to ask him what he would like for tea. It would be a wonder if they never starved themselves or settled for raw batter and belly-aches – but that she knows is a realm of hypotheticals and thankfully non-reality. It is just her anxiety that whispers such notions to her, Amy reminds herself, her hand falling across her front in a reminder of what is real and so very right.

"No. Thank you," Laurie looks up and for a second his black eyes are on her and she feels it. "Soup would be rather good don't you think?" She nods and he looks away again, propped up on the window sill beside his chair. "Always thought it fed the soul."

Amy moves to the door, feeling her heart beating in her ears as her hand lands on the knob. "I'll tell the cook," she says obediently. She will not voice her memory of Jo's last soup before her wedding day and her sister's words as she deposited the spilt, very spare soup that was the best tasting dish she ever served. Amy will walk without tripping on her dress for she has the natural grace her sister always lacked. She will tell the cook and they will eat the soup in relative silence at seven o'clock before a night like every night begins.

…

That night she lies on her back looking at the ceiling as Laurie sleeps on his side, turned away from her. She does not wonder why he has always slept facing the wall but she does let her hand creep from his arm to lie on her stomach.

She thinks about his words that afternoon and she thinks about thoughts she has considered very quietly for the past few days. At first she dismissed them as silly, knowing that her sister would never do such a thing. Marriage and love have always been serious to Jo and after having turned Laurie away the first time, causing both of them so much pain, Amy thinks her sister would never change her mind.

But then she knows her husband so well, lives with him and knows his habits undisguised. His words, always simple and looks, always tender have delighted her endlessly with their singular devotion to her but change, she knows is inevitable. Their romance she knew would wax and wane like the moon as marriage is never an unending time of settled happiness. Still, like the moon, it would be timeless and always there. And yet, she thinks sadly it has only taken a month. One month of sudden changes and poorly masked squabbles have marked the waning moon sooner than she expected. The differences in not only his smile and attention, but his posture and words have told Amy more than she cares to know. It has brought these selfish, untrusting thoughts to her, thoughts she believes are unworthy of Jo and Laurie.

Her sister would not hurt her or fool and torment Laurie and he, Amy thinks, her hand drifting back to his arm, would not imagine tearing apart this life they have made. What was in past, he has told her so many times whenever her little selfish fears have found their way to her lips, is in the past.

He has quoted her sister but he has done that before and she has simply misread them.

…

Laurie does not leave the house for a week and Amy feels as though the smile will never leave her face. She can still recall the kiss he gave her after breakfast before disappearing into his study. Work has become the main event of his day, and she, Amy thinks with a heavy blush, has become the main event of his night.

She worries though, a little and not enough to stop anything, that the increase in activity might spoil her secret but really she is spoilt for Laurie's attention and the moon is full. She worries and puts it aside as she does her paintbrush when the sun looks ready to set and her husband enters her parlour.

"Sometimes I think I'll be glad to never see another sheet of paper as long as I live," he says stretching before coming over to kiss her. Amy smiles sympathetically before her hands go to his shoulders as he bends over her and kisses her on the bench. His touch is as sweet as it was in the morning and Amy knows she will never tire of this.

"Oh that's rather good," he says when he straightens and her hands fall back into her lap. He is referring of course to her painting but for a moment she feels silly and girlish enough to think it is a veiled reference to them. Her cheeks are still pink when she thanks him and he sends a proud smile her way, offering his arm as they walk to the library where they will wait for dinner.

She sits opposite him, facing the window so that he will have to intentionally turn in his chair if he wishes to stare out. It is devious and clever of her and she feels just a little guilty for it but the pleasure of him watching her as she mends his shirt is worth it and she silently plans to do it again the following night.

Laurie's hand is on his chin, his long finger resting across his lip as he watches her diligently work, needle in and out, a short tug, needle in and out. His eyes are not following her movements she knows, but are rather resting on the shape of her neck, the light in her hair turned the richest of golds from the sunset. She smiles in thought of the colour, forgetting to wonder how three buttons were torn from his shirt and the work is soon complete, her husband still watching.

"It's nice to see the colour in your cheeks again, dear." Laurie says quietly filling the companionable silence. She knows the stress she caused him after the last miscarriage. She knows she would not have been able to live with her were their roles reversed. "I don't know how long it's been there but I'm glad for it. You always did look best at dusk."

Amy looks up at him, her eyelashes long. "Thank you my lord," she replies, tongue-in-cheek. He looks a little startled by her playful answer, his eyes flicking over her as though he does not recognise who she is in the moment. He decides to smile at her and lean forward, his forearms against his long knees.

"You're quite welcome."

…

Her hair is still wet when his hands brush through it, his lips making marks across her clean skin. They are in the bathroom and she has not had a chance to dry; his heat makes her shiver and she moans for more, small hands clutching at his shoulders.

"Amy," he breathes, hands moving over her body as though he cannot touch her enough. Her mouth opens under his and she reaches to touch the blades of his shoulders, the skin she knows under it as taught as she feels. She pulls off his waistcoat, the buttons already loosened before he entered the room and soon her hands are peeling off his shirt as his dip lower on her body.

He is touching her with a ferocity she has never fully known but Amy does not question it, merely leans into his body and surrenders to his fever-like heat. She wonders in the briefest of impulses if his parents died in such a way. The thought is brushed away with the feeling of his hand cupping her head, its enormity large enough to encompass the back of her head easily as they kiss, open-mouthed and messily.

Laurie pulls them to the cold ground and she is shaking with so many things and says nothing as he continues to kiss her vehemently. She holds her breath and imagines that he is doing this to prove something to himself. When she stops breathing, lying flat against the tiles he pulls back to stare down at her, hair a mess looking like a caged animal. She understands in her heart of hearts but Amy Laurence is fair and charming and as vapid as the colour choices for their bed sheets and chooses to kiss him again, forgetting his look and concentrating on the steadying thump of her heart as he breathes less surely than before.

His hands are clammy when they grasp at her and she closes her eyes. She tries to feel warm but with the cold on her back and the fire atop she feels more like she is suffocating in differences and a disaster. She scrunches her eyes tight as his lips move down her neck and his large hands cover her breasts. His fingers are against her ribs even as his palm rolls against the cold points of her nipples and she is gasping for air.

She worries what he would think could he hear her thoughts and promptly focuses on thinking of nothing but the feeling of his body against hers, his lips, long and hot against her skin, his legs tangled with hers.

Laurie's hands are soon dancing lower and she inhales when his thumb – she knows it is his thumb as it is every time – brushes the gentle part to her womb. Her hips twitch and she lets out a breath she hasn't known she held. Amy realises quite suddenly that this is all very simple and she lets Laurie continue without the tightness in her chest, the frozen stillness of her limbs. He is her husband and with her eyes shut and the secret lying inches from his long, deliciously careful fingers it is increasingly bearable. The fire soon returns to her limbs and it is as though he has just stepped into the bathroom all over again.

She doesn't remember if her mother said anything about fingers and stolen moments in rooms and places other than the bed but the heated passion is more than welcome. She is entirely grateful that for once Laurie directs such enthusiasm towards her. She thinks not of the last time she saw his face as such and thinks not for whom it was for.

Her eyes are closed and Amy knows that it will be over soon and she will have enjoyed herself. She bends her legs and boldly takes his wrists, moving them to her breasts as she lifts her hips to meet his – they have done this dozens of times and yet this, she knows is the first time he has cried and buried his face in her hair. He is shaking with such small and hated sobs that she stills quickly. Amy scurries to sit with him and his arms go around her, still stubbornly keeping his head over her shoulder and she tries not to worry more than she already has. Anxiety has been her curse before and she refuses to let mistakes repeat more than twice.

It will hurt him if she speaks but then, she thinks a little like the wronged Amy of past with a fire before her and a manuscript in her hands that she has been hurting for some time. He has stilled and his weight is familiar though heavy and she sniffs the small sound like a hammer between them.

Amy wonders if the wet ends of her hair cool his face as her fingers dance across his shoulder blades. She is cold and the bathroom is silent.


	3. Chapter 3

When Jo wakes the first thing she notices is that her thighs feel sticky. Groaning she opens her eyes to find that the heavy weight is her husband sleeping, still holding her closely. She blinks a few times trying to remember how long it took her to fall asleep in such a way before she slides out from underneath him and pads to the bathroom.

The water is icy cold but she would rather bathe right away than take the time to heat it. Pulling her nightdress over her head she sinks into the path, scrubbing fiercely at her thighs and hips, feeling sick at the thought that there is still no blood. Her nausea becomes all too quickly literal and she grabs the side of the bath, opening her mouth to a flood of hot bile. It burns as it makes its heaving way up and she cringes as it stings her nose.

Once she is quite sure there is nothing left from last night's dinner she sits back in the cold water and tries to ignore the smell left on the bath tiles. She will have to clean it once she is dressed. Jo looks to the window where the early stirring of the sun is barely glowing past the glass. Nausea, she thinks, is a damning sign.

…

She walks to the Laurence's with a hand on her stomach. Jo knows from her sisters' pregnancies that she will not show for a while yet and silently thanks the Lord for it. No one, she thinks, can know – not until she is certain that the baby will continue to grow. She knows that at least from Amy's past experiences that the child may not survive such an uneasy time and Jo closes her eyes in quick silent prayer for the two buried in their backyard under the birches.

Oh, did she even want this? Jo's eyes scrunch as she tries to map out how far she has fallen from her faith and from God by her actions. She is still a Christian woman and she knows exactly what her mother would say and exactly what she should think, but this child – if it is Laurie's it changes everything.

"God," she sobs, using her arm to wipe at her eyes quickly, feet still carrying her down the dirt road. If it is Laurie's would she be able to see such a creation die? She loves him, she knows it every time he looks at her and something catches in her throat. She knows it every time his lips touch hers. She knew it long before when they ran about like cats and dogs climbing harmless trees and skating on spring ice.

Jo thinks she has been such a fool and has brought this entirely upon herself. She never considered the few contraceptives she'd read of in the small books she keeps for herself in Plumfield's library, high enough that little boys with inquisitive fingers might never find lest they have a growth spurt. Could she imagine such a little boy of her own? Jo wonders, her fingers brushing against the dense material of her dress-front. She has so many already but none – none, Jo brushes her dress again – none are _her own_.

If she'd only said yes, she thinks knowing it is the one thing she will take with regret to her grave. Laurie has said it often enough, never in spite though she understands when the muscles in his chest tighten and at this very moment she agrees.

She is carrying their illegitimate child and she has a name for herself that she will never use.

…

The door opens to reveal a timid maid. Amy has never raised her voice with the staff but Jo wonders at the quietness of the girl who leads her in.

"Mrs Laurence is ill this morning, I'm sorry," she says and truly sounds it. Jo nods quickly for it is not her sister she has come for. The maid is walking towards the study and Jo supposes that Laurie is within before the words pass the girl's mouth. "Mr Laurie is working in here." _Though you shan't disturb him_ goes unspoken between them and the maid opens the door without another sound.

Jo watches her leave as quickly and silently as when she opened the main door before she turns to find Laurie with his head on the desk. He looks just as he did when he was still a boy and she is loathed to wake him. There is darkness under his eyes and she wonders what that means just as her hand skims across the edge of his brow, pushing back hair that she knows has been grown for her.

Laurie stirs under her light touch and she is surprised when her name comes from his lips. "Jo," he moans before blearily looking up at her.

"How did you know?" she asks, amusement twitching a smile on her otherwise deadpanned face.

He sits up a little straighter, his own smile mirroring hers. "I've always known."

Jo rolls her eyes at his obvious sentimentality before she takes the seat opposite him. She speculates as Laurie grooms himself quickly that there is a high certainty of Amy making an appearance and decides it wise to sit further back in the chair.

"So what brings you here on such a morning?"

Jo eyes his appearance. "Truly you do not look well Teddy."

"Thank you! As much as I'd like to think our deep psychic connection goes long and fair to Plumfield I know it doesn't, Jo. Do I need to ask you again?" Laurie's hands are folded and he looks tired as he leans over them conspiratorially his face in a half-joked expression. Jo watches him carefully before covering his hands with her own.

"Really, Teddy."

Laurie tugs his hands out from under hers and leans back and she thinks this is the first time he has pulled away from her since the field. She doesn't know what this means but it hurts just as it did that horrible day after he graduated. Jo wonders if it is something she has done. Has she told him she loves him enough? Did she leave it too long to see him again?

"Just not… sleeping well," he settles on and Jo reads the unspoken truth behind those words.

"I see." She says, sounding at a loss. Laurie suddenly looks very sorry and his hands reach for hers just as Jo begins to pull back.

"Don't" he says and she doesn't. That contracted word means so much between them now that there is no old hesitation. Laurie's thumb brushes the back of her hand and Jo must look away or risk telling him everything. They sit that way, hands held as their eyes dart around the study for some time until the chime of the clock on the wall fills the room and breaks the gentleness.

"So, what _do_ I owe this visit to?"

Jo blinks very carefully and swallows every word about her discovery and foolish notion of his welcomed comfort. Instead she leans forward, over the desk and kisses him, her hand on his jaw as their eyes flutter shut. She pauses; lips still pressed to his, breathing through her nose and knowing that this is wrong, so wrong that there will be no end.

The moment to stop has long since passed and she is trapped and spinning.

Laurie's lips move against hers and she can feel his teeth on her tongue as his hand moves to her cheek. Her back hurts from her position and her mind is wheeling at the complications that lie beyond the door to this suddenly shrinking room. Jo cannot breathe but she will not break this kiss, she won't stand and move back to the seat or better yet leave the house because she can't – she realises she is panicking and the best thing to hold to is on the other side of this desk

"We can't," Laurie says as soon as they break apart and Jo is struggling for air. She isn't thinking as far as he is but when he pushes his papers to the side it quickly becomes clear. She blinks slowly back as his black eyes watch her, waiting in their gilded cage. Jo swallows for what feels like the hundredth time in his study before she quite deliberately lifts her head and walks out of the room. The door makes no sound as she closes it. The maid is standing in the corner of the foyer, tray-in-hand and to Jo she might as well be Saint Peter himself. Only when her feet fall on the gravel and she feels her sister's eyes on her from the second floor can she breathe again.

…

She never explains that visit. Not when Laurie asks as they lie stretched across the bed of his guestroom, panting and desperately trying not to relive the last time they did so. Jo never explains when Amy is well and she visits with a basket, apples tucked neatly under pink cloth and her sweet smile stabs at Jo's heart. She can't remember the last time she cried and the thankful part of herself is engulfed by her unending guilt and increasing nausea.

The smiling part of this affair, she knows, is over. When she sees Laurie her ears burn and she will not meet his gaze until they are alone, and even then it is fleeting before she closes her eyes and falls into the realm of touch and breath. She cannot smile before they part, as though it is only a matter of time til they will be joined again and she will feel like a whole person. Instead she finds herself forced to make quips or leave in a silence that seems deadening and she knows she is hurting her boy as much as the unborn child is growing, day by day.

Jo feels as if her soul is made of mud. She sticks to everything as cold and indolent as though winter has set in her spirit and it might slowly freeze her in a time where she will not have to face the consequences she dreads.

Clouds creep across the night sky that she watches, her hands clenching in her lap in an effort not to pet the still-flat shape of her belly. The days in which she imagined her castle are gone. Beth lies six-feet under a cold rock as heavy as her heart and she has no one to tell what she will do. She wishes, as her eyes dart to the packet lying on the table in the dark, she wishes more than anything that she might be held by Beth just now. Her throat is tight and she soon returns to watching the moon through the window above the sofa.

She will wait one more week.


	4. Chapter 4

They sit at breakfast, the unusually lacklustre silver bowls glinting in the morning sun that slips through the lace curtains of the dining room windows. He feels surprisingly good; refreshed even after last night's sleep and it is just when he thinks the world could throw anything at him that his wife speaks.

"Laurie," she says in that quiet voice he thinks she has practiced for living with servants. She was never so quiet as a girl. "There is something I have not told you. I've known for a little while yet I think it's time you do too, for I've spoken with the doctor and he agrees." Something coils in his stomach as he watches his wife slack-jawed from the other end of the table. Is she ill? Why hasn't he noticed? But Amy is smiling and something colours her cheek the shade of the apples in the low-lying basket between them.

"Oh Laurie," his name spills from her lips in one breath, "I'm pregnant."

There are moments in his life where time has ceased to hold meaning and he can hear his very heart beating in his chest. Laurie realises this is one of those moments and it is all he can do to remember to keep breathing and blink. When he has achieved those small wonders he closes his mouth and swallows, looking to his plate of bread and jam. Amy is pregnant. Amy his wife is carrying his child.

In an instant he recalls the two buried in the backyard, naught marking their tiny graves bar two pale sticks with worn ribbons tied atop. She has kept this news from him in case – he cannot finish the thought and looks up at Amy instead.

She is watching him steadily as he processes all of this in the span of seconds and he suddenly cannot help the smile that breaks across his face. "That's –" They are having a baby, he smiles. His heart breaks instantly in the betrayal – Jo and he will be torn apart and there is nothing he will be able to do or say to stop it. A child is something he has been praying – he pray! – for two years past. Fate has dealt him this hand and there is nothing he can do to stop it.

"Wonderful."

…

The rest of the day is like walking through a nightmare where he can say nothing and his legs always carry him forward. Laurie feels as though he is shaking with the urge to break something, to bury his fist in fire, to _do something_ but when he looks at his hands on the green card of his desk they are solemn and still. Inside he hates himself, hates the cruel turns of Providence as he is as trapped as he was before. Was there ever a moment he was not? He wonders, thinking of the field behind Plumfield and the shade of that tree.

The inevitability of it all is oppressive. He knows the one thing he will have to do and it weighs on his shoulders as though he carries Atlas' burden.

He has to tell Jo.

…

Plumfield is suspiciously quiet that afternoon. Laurie steps across the threshold without knocking or calling for the old woman. He knows Jo will be about and as he enters the kitchen he finds her unexpectedly under the table.

"Hello!" he says surprised. Jo immediately shushes him and motions for him to get under the table with her. Bemused he climbs down beside her with his knees to his chest, unimaginably cramped as his long limbs tried to bend.

"Hello," he tries again in a whisper. Jo is trying not to laugh at the look on his face and he smiles to see her so carefree. The frown she has worn the past two weeks is forgotten and he really, really wishes he wasn't about to call it back. "Jo," he says softly, placing a hand on her arm as she looks towards the kitchen door intently.

"Shh," she repeats, batting away his hand as she moves to her haunches. Laurie curses his height as they shuffle under between the chairs before crouching by the sink. "Hide and seek," Jo explains when Laurie motions to stand. "You'll get us caught," she says tugging him down again and he has to laugh at the seriousness of her expression.

Everything is suddenly in high clarity. He can see the soft lines around the corners of her eyes when she smiles at him in irritation. The feel of her fingers just as they let go is more poignant than before. She smells like the spilt flour he noticed on the table's surface beside them and the lavender oil she keeps on the sill of her bathroom. He can't do it, Laurie realises he can't tell her just yet.

"Come on," he whispers, pulling them both to a stand before taking Jo's hand and leading them to the mop-cupboard. Jo's nose crinkles against the idea but he's soon pushing her in, climbing in after as he jerries the door shut with his fingers almost caught in the edges.

They are squashed against each other and he finds himself inexplicably relaxed despite the height of the cupboard and the ache in his thighs as he stands over Jo. Her hands have gone to his collar without her knowing, for her eyes are still on the cupboard door and he can feel the heat from her cheeks. He adores her just then.

Laurie presses a kiss to the corner of her mouth and feels infantile and blessed and wretched all at once. He has known, has heard Jo say so herself that what they have will never be able to last. They have been caught in it since she stopped him flying home in the field behind this house. But he cannot stop himself from this… love, desire, need, he settles on, pulling back to look at Jo properly. It is a desperate need to be with her, always.

He will be with her always, he knows, in different forms perhaps but always.

In the meantime he will kiss her and pretend everything is as fine as it can be in this torment.

…

She is staring at him. Her eyes are glassy and her mouth ajar as she processes everything he has spilled. God, he thinks, I should have prepared her. But really, he considers, hand curling in and out of a fist as he fights with himself to approach her, how does one tell his lover that her sister is legitimately pregnant with his child?

"I'm so s-"

"Are you sure?" Jo cuts him off before he can finish what he means most. He is sorry and stupid and unforgiveable.

He nods, unable to face her. "We had the doctor call," he says recalling Amy's words and the mysterious visits he'd seen the old man pay when he was coming or going. Amy's rosy cheeks and quiet looks suddenly seemed inadequate signs.

Laurie looks up at Jo again but she is watching the window as though it holds salvation and he can see the tears in her eyes.

"Then this is it," Jo's nose is crinkled again as she tries not to cry in front of him.

"Jo –" She turns to face him and her face breaks his heart even more. He wants to stride the two steps he knows it will take to bring her against his chest and wrap his sorry arms around her and lie to them both. But he knows Jo will take this opportunity to make a better woman - though there is none better - of herself. He knows how much it has hurt her every time they have finished and he has kissed her brow and she has looked away. He knows these things because he knows her.

He loves her best.

"Go," she tells him. Laurie doesn't believe for a second that she'd rather him out of her house and heart and he moves to comfort her. "Be with Amy, Laurie." he feels a pain slice through his throat. He is 'Teddy' to her and no one else but she will have no use for that name after today. So he nods and tries to be understanding and gentlemanlike for every urge he has to crush her to him and pretend that they can escape this fate. That he hasn't made liars out of them both.

He walks out of the kitchen through the same door as the boy.

…

The dirt crunches under his heavy feet as he walks but he cannot hear the sound. The sun will not set for another few hours so Amy will still be painting when he arrives home feeling gutted and heartbroken with a smile she won't recognise. He doesn't think he will ever be able to smile properly again for it would only be another lie on top of so many more important ones.

Yet he wishes they were still lying.

Immediately Laurie cancels that thought, taking his hands out of his trousers' pockets. He can't think better of himself, but he can and does think Jo would never agree. Not now when so much more of his life has gotten impossibly complicated. Laurie knows he is accountable for every errant action he has taken this year and it is so much more painful knowing he is the singular cause of them all. He cannot blame Jo's wiles for she has none. He cannot blame Amy's hopes for he shared them equally.

He wanted to be part of the March family and he has buried himself in it. Neither even share that name anymore and it brings him to dreaming of days so long past he cannot imagine his present self in them. He will be a proper head of a proper family now, a startling reality that he supposed he never truly considered would happen. Not within the cards he had been dealt.

Not without Jo, he knows he means.

Laurie sighs, the sound muted by nature along the dusty road. His hands return to his pockets, coat-tails swinging in the wake of his long, tempered stride. He has long lost the energy to be angry and irrational and he determines it is age and not wisdom that has made him so. Jo has mastered her temper and he his passion. Or both have been swallowed by the designs they made in separation.

He will be with her; Laurie reminds himself, looking up from the left, right step of his feet. She will not let him be her lover, but Jo will always be his sister-by-law and she will always be at one end of this well-worn road. His feelings will not change with time, both know that now and as Jo's have come to light he guesses she will not easily forget. There is no doubt she will try, and she will pretend but he knows she is his heart and there is no evading that.

For now he will retreat to corners. He will only hurt others if he is to play a role in the next few months and it is with that understanding Laurie decides to become an observer. If he says nothing and simply watches, surely, he thinks, he can do no further harm.

It is naive, he knows and completely foolish to think he will simply follow through with such a thing but he can try. He can try for Jo's sake and for Amy's relief.

Laurie's feet have taken him the whole way home and he feels guilty for the small sensation of relief at seeing the tall pale building staring back, the same as ever. He walks up the blue steps to the blue-framed door and enters without a knock or a servant waiting for his coat. He keeps the article on and treads quietly to Amy's parlour. He spies her through the glass panes of the French doors and watches her as she pays every attention to the angle of her brush stroke, matching the various shades of green – shades she insists on calling different colours – with layers of the colour beneath. It is repetitive and demanding and yet he has great respect for this aspect of her personality that drives her to sit on her padded stool, watching the garden and painting its delights behind the glass almost every day.

It keeps her busy and keeps her happy and he would never deny those two things so important in making a March woman.

Laurie turns from the familiar scene and moves back to the foyer to climb the stairs two and three at a time. He will not let Amy know he is back until supper. Clutching the unbuttoned front of his coat he opens the door to their bedroom and closes it behind him, ever mindful of the noise it makes when he kicks it shut with his foot. He walks across the room in that same steady pace he knows he learnt from Brooke and his grandfather and finds himself standing before the grand window that looks out towards the road he has just travelled. It is almost gold in the sun and he can't look away. He should never look at it again.

Laurie lets go of the front of his coat and shuffles to the bed, sinking to it with his head bowed. He pulls off his boots and thinks not of putting them way or sitting them straight but lies backwards without a pillow under his head. He closes his eyes and tries not to recall this day.

…

Holding the silver fork Amy polished yesterday, Laurie pokes at the indeterminable fowl on his plate, feeling not for the first time this day that he has no appetite. His wife is seated at the opposite end of the table smiling lightly as she eats, sipping every now and then on the glass of water that sits proudly beside her glass of wine. There is much to celebrate in that smile and Laurie feels a hollow emptiness fill his insides at the thought.

"To think, we've waited for this so long and now the time has finally come," Amy delicately pauses in between bites to smile so sweetly it almost brakes him. "Oh Laurie, I'm so happy and now everyone can share in this feeling." She laughs in a way that takes him back to a time when he brought her flowers, harmless though it had been when she was fourteen. He hadn't wanted to bring anyone posies but Jo back then but she'd been as prickly as rose-thorns and he had contented himself with delighting her sisters in harmless gifts she would not accept. His feelings had to have a went.

Laurie drops his fork and leans back in his chair. He attempts a tight smile in Amy's direction and thinks of the pasts he has considered ever since she told him that morning she was pregnant. Those pasts where Jo starred in her old boyish glory Laurie finds only put the present in an even colder light. He has to be the man his grandfather taught him to be, the man he has set the path in becoming. Or is it Amy who nurtured that entirely contradictory aspect of his self?

"I want you to tell me exactly what Jo said, word-by-word Laurie. Don't miss anything out! Oh if only I could have been there with you – but I suppose, it can't be helped. I will of course reserve my right to tell Meg first though." Amy is more the woman he has come to expect her to be when she subtly reproaches him; he notes she has lost her doe eyes and has replaced them with sparkling discernment. "You don't mind do you? Oh I'm so happy."

He shakes his head in answer to her final question as his mind scrambles desperately for something Jo-like to say about her youngest sister's pregnancy. Well, he accounts sourly, something she might were she not in love with her sister's husband and he not the kind to make desperate love to her in the cellar.

Laurie fiddles with the edge of his napkin and schools his expression into something resembling distant fondness as he makes up a conversation that never happened to which his wife giggles over the end of her supper.

…

He wakes to the sound of someone crying and peeks through crusty eyelids to find the bed empty. Digging the pads of his fingers into his eyes he climbs out of bed, heading for the bathroom where the sharp sobbing can be heard. Pushing the door open he sleepily blinks about until he finds Amy sitting in the bath with her small hands swiping quickly at her face. He thinks of Jo in that unimportant action.

"Amy," his voice is thick and pitched low with sleep. He bends down beside the tub, a hand in the water noticing it has gone cold. When did she wake? Laurie wonders, the fearful part of himself connecting her tears with his secret. God, he prays, she couldn't know could she?

"What is it?"

"Oh," she suddenly laughs, and Laurie knows she thinks herself ridiculous. "It's just – nothing, Laurie. Go back to bed, it's still early." He looks around the tiled room, smelling something like bile and acid.

"Are you ill?" he asks feeling instantly guilty for the idea that perhaps she is sick and might fall without child. It was still early in the pregnancy and it has happened before. It is a disgraceful thought and yet he has had it. He knows what creature he is.

"No, it's just as the doctor said it would be," Amy says reassuringly, her wet hands falling on the arms of his nightshirt.

"Oh." Laurie is still at a lost. It is so early and he is trying to see through his guilt. She was so happy last night and now she is sitting in the bath crying and it all feels like too much for him to understand at this hour.

"Everything's perfectly normal."

…

It is raining the next time he sees Jo and he feels as terrible as the weather. She will not meet his eyes.

"- since May," says Amy to her mother who smiles at her youngest with pride. Amy fell pregnant with chid in the same month the professor left for the west and the same month he and Jo began –

"You must be so happy," Marmee speaks in a voice that understands what the third month in this child's development means to them all. Amy stayed in Orchard House twice before after pregnancies shorter than this and Laurie would not have the rose taken out of Amy's cheeks though it had stolen much more from him.

Jo's hand is in her husband's and she smiles only when Amy turns her way. Laurie watches quietly as he hovers by Amy, thinking of his meaning to wallflower through the months and knowing yet what watching Jo means. The look on her face when she turns to the window instead of her family is killing him.

He would change so much if he could.

"You promise you won't let her do anything to vigorous or risky, and make sure she eats so that she won't fit through a door, won't you Laurie?" Meg is holding Daisy on her hip when she pulls Laurie aside as Amy leaves for the kitchen with her mother.

"You've my word, Meg." He is distracted and Meg misses the way his eyes fall to Jo as Demi runs into her legs asking if there's anything to do indoors "at all". Daisy jumps from her mother to run off with Demi and Laurie is left standing in front of Beth's piano trying not to look at the Bhaers. He runs his fingers over the turned corner of the piano's covering earnestly wishing its owner back.

She would have known what to do, would have set him right and someone else in this world would have known. He misses having her hold his sleeve as he reads, and he misses having an unbiased confidante but really, he knows he just misses her 'plain and simple' as Jo used to say. Laurie crams his fingers into his trouser pocket. He'd never know what she'd say about his child.

"Laurie," Jo has moved beside him and he is surprised by her sudden closeness, lost in his thoughts. Her eyes are not on him though and for every manner that hurts he forgives her instantly because really, how can he blame her? It is him – it is entirely his own making this disaster. He has never taken the fall so willingly.

"We've something to share," she says quietly and he wonders why Fritz looks at her so fondly before coming to stand with them both. He clamps down a wave of jealousy he has no right to when Friedrich takes Jo's hand and she grips it tightly.

"Th-there will be two babies this winter," Jo stutters unusually. Laurie watches her in confusion.

"Two?"

"Jo is with child!" Professor Bhaer smiles widely at him and Laurie's heart freezes. The older man takes his hand from Jo's to wrap it around her small shoulders before embracing Laurie fiercely. The taller man is fixed to the spot as the German pats him several times on the back in what Laurie must assume is some fraternity for fatherhood-to-be. Laurie's eyes remain on Jo however and she is watching him in dread and he swears she is trembling before her husband steps back. It is Jo's turn to be congratulated and Laurie holds her cold hands without feeling.

"Jo I –" what could he say?

She musters up an off-handed smile for her husband's benefit. The effect is that of a wooden puppet as she blinks slowly, keeping her face the picture of normality. He can't stop staring.

"Congratulations," he finally gets out, pulling her in for a hug that seems all to brief. He smiles and pecks her cheek, as her dearest friend should do. Inside he is shaking glass. Is it mine? Is it mine? He shakes, silently asking her as he holds her hands a little too long. She blinks and her eyes fall to the side where Beth's piano lies behind them.

He feels as though he is made of ice.

_A/N: I have to apologize for the anachronisms I know keep spilling into this story. It's more a lack of my familiarity in writing present tense than research so I'm sorry coz that is lazy. Thank you Kissin Concern and Mariagoner for your lovely reviews!! I hope the rest of you are just avoiding coz of the rating/content and the time of the year :P_


	5. Chapter 5

A/N: I'm sorry guys, but I had this planned after the chapters in One Hundred so it was always going to happen like this :(

Jo watches as Laurie struggles to keep the smile on his face, his eyes flicking between her and Fritz. She knows he has decided it is futile when he fixes his eyes on the mantelpiece above the sofa they were sitting on moments ago and she feels as though she has gutted her best friend. There is nothing she can do to stop him hurting anymore than she can stop her own misery. She cannot keep looking at his face and so she smiles at her husband and conjectures about the boys she has left at Plumfield.

"We must return soon," the Professor says warmly with a smile she knows he has made just for her and Jo nods, keeping her eyes on the carpet rug before Laurie excuses himself to look for his wife. Jo swallows quickly lest she burst into tears and feels the comforting squeeze of her husband's hand. She shouldn't even know his comfort for she deserves none least of all his.

"Let's say our goodbyes," Jo speaks quickly before her voice will break and with a deep breath and another wooden smile she follows the direction Laurie went into the kitchen.

Amy is smiling over her china cup talking to Laurie who stands beside her, leaning on the bench. Marmee looks up when she enters the room and smiles softly, the happiness for both her daughters wrinkling the corners of her eyes. Jo feels as though she is choking when she sees that smile. She smoothes her hands on the front of her dress, mask wobbling when she bends to kiss her mother.

"We've got to get back," Jo explains.

"I understand," her mother says, caressing the side of her second daughter's cheek. "Travel safely," she looks to Bhaer as though it is his charge and Jo straightens.

"Goodbye Amy," Jo hesitates before walking around the table to embrace her sister. It is brief but fierce and Amy looks surprised when Jo pulls back. "I promise to visit soon," Jo mumbles, knowing it is a promise she has no intention of keeping.

"I'd like that," her sister says and means it.

"'Bye, Laurie," Jo looks at him quickly and he is watching her with old eyes. She leaves the room before her husband finishes his farewells and walks as quick as she can to the front door. When she is outside and alone she clutches the stiff front of her dress and tries hard to breathe.

…

It is when nowhere feels like home that she takes to sitting on the window frame, balancing on the sofa's back to keep her there. Jo tucks her folded arms against her body, clutching at the sides of her nightdress with her hands as she looks through the pane to the field that lies far beyond. She tries not to think of her arms as a protective barrier to this one lie, one secret bigger than them all.

There is a chill in the air she cannot shake. The bed that lies in the bedroom down the hall will be warm and cosy with her patient husband and trimmed blankets but she knows no respite from the ice in her bones. It is barely autumn and yet she knows the days are getting shorter.

Jo looks down briefly at the folded material of her roomy nightdress that hangs in excess over her thin arms. She wants to love this child, wants to think it will bring her unimaginable happiness – will bring happiness to her husband too. She cannot see a light at the end of this path though and it is swamping her with fear and a terror that paralyses. Jo hates to be trapped, to be stuck and she knows what those feelings bring her to do – drastic things that turn her life upside down. For better or worse only to be known in the future consequences.

God, she prays closing her eyes, squeezing her middle. Help me.

The vial lies not three feet away and all she can think about is Laurie's face.

It will be the greatest betrayal she has ever enacted. It will hurt her, it will hurt God, the child and most importantly Laurie. She wonders when her world began and ended with him but it has most certainly been there for years. She has factored him in for so long – in her decision to go to New York, in her loneliness after Beth, in the distance between his house and Plumfield.

She can't even think of the child, not now when it has already gone along far enough. It is easier to think of it as a noun and nothing more than a secret so poisonous to her family that it shouldn't matter. It shouldn't matter and yet Jo knows, so, _so_ well that it does.

It is _so hard_.

Jo swipes a hand across her eyes, her tears starting up again. If Fritz catches her crying again he will ask questions and she won't have the heart to keep lying to him. She is destroying her soul over this. Who she is as a person is no longer so clear-cut and shaped. Jo has lost herself months ago and found the person she should have been and the person she doesn't want to be and the person she fears most she will be. It is killing her, she decides.

And yet she will do so much more.

Her hands move back to feeling the shape of her stomach. It is easy to imagine that her cold thin hands are the large warm ones of Laurie and for a moment, with her eyes shut and her head against the windowpane he is with her. Jo begins to shake with that thought and pulls her head off the glass and onto her raised knees.

He will never be allowed to know this child the way he ought. Jo knows well enough that he is no fool and could read her as he always had back in the sitting room in Orchard House and the thought burns. They have both made so many mistakes and it has only hurt them. She wishes that she might have been made stronger; that the attention to perfecting and desire for altruism might have been more real to her than it had been to her parents. But she is no daughter of transcendentalism in the end.

The moon is hidden in clouds and it only grows colder. Her head turns to see the darkness that lies stretched out beneath her and across to that golden place and she thinks of that fleeting moment where she felt her throat thick as Laurie marched off. Just before she stopped him, somehow Jo knew and it is now she wishes so much she had let him go.

All of this could have been avoided, she thinks. She digs her fingers into the material, pushing at her belly. She imagines, just for five minutes what their child would be like. Jo sees dark intelligent eyes set in a narrow face, with lips that quirk at snarks and gossip and love and anger. Their child would be tall and thin but with such strength of spirit no torment would ever knock down and she thinks, she would always be proud. There would be an impossible amount of adoration and spoiling counterbalanced with well-meaning lectures and a wealth of humanist books. An endless amount of adventure and a disposition for the mischievous and a gentle heart filled with so much caring. Five minutes pass quickly and Jo is left feeling sick and she cannot stop crying.

Just wait, she half-begs with herself. There are three more days left in the week Jo promised herself and there are three more days to be sure.

She worries though, that three more days means too much time for change. Already she knows she has put on a little weight, it is obvious when her fingers are digging into her skin as she does now. Jo is no stranger to the changes in her body, for she expects them with every tick of the grandfather clock and yet she hates them.

Her moods have changed too. She wants to yell more and more and stamp her foot or tear the children from their toys and be selfish and angry as she was when she was sixteen and ridiculous. She has never liked her temper or the devilish things it makes her want to do in the heat of the moment and with every day that has passed since Laurie was in her kitchen Jo has felt it there, simmering, waiting for her to snap. She feels it the same way she feels the cold in her bones and the lie in her belly.

It is dangerous, her mind whispers, to think of all these things so tied together. It is dangerous because she knows she will do something to find the woman her mother raised her to be. It is dangerous and she will fall into it.

A week is a reminder and Jo turns to God more than ever before.

…

She makes the visit to Amy's after all.

Amy is sitting with her paints lined up against the bench that is marked with fading colours and varnish stains. Jo smiles and knows her sister sees her tiredness but there are so much more important things she has to hide. Amy clutches a paintbrush in her lap as she makes room for Jo along the bench she sits on.

"How have you been?" she asks, her eyes dropping to the floor. Jo knows that Amy is thinking of their mutual condition and she tries to smile again.

"Well, thank you," she says softly, kind enough that Amy looks up and takes her hand.

"The first time is always the strangest," she says and Jo wonders at her choice of words. How they will ring even truer tomorrow, she thinks, imagining Amy knows not of her context.

"How are you?"

"Well too," Amy smiles and she looks shy with happiness. "Oh Jo, it means so much to me that my sister will be my companion through this! I think this time, this time it will all work out."

Jo attempts a smile and squeezes her sister's wrist gently. She hopes it will.

Looking about the room Jo admires the way nature almost intrudes into it. The floor-length glass windows remind her of the Laurence's conservatory and she knows her sister is as happy with that comparison as she is. The gentle slope of the park is an apple green in the midday sun and the pine forest that lines the yard borders it in contrast. "What a beautiful day," Jo remarks and Amy nods, looking out the windows too.

"These are the best days to paint," she says, adjusting her grip of the brush so that it is poised before the canvass in front of them. Jo leaves the bench and smiles at the golden head suddenly consumed by an array of blues on the palette resting beside her.

"I'll leave you to it," Amy looks up at her husband's words from her sister's lips and smiles, already brushing her painted sky again.

"Thank you, Jo. Come by again soon won't you? We can pick colours for the babies to wear."

Jo nods though she knows it will be a long time before she sets foot in this room again.

She walks at her own pace across the wooden floor of Amy's studio back to the French doors. Sliding the folding wood behind her Jo pauses only once before searching out Laurie. Knowing he is almost always in his study she instead tries for the hallway upstairs. It is a gamble but when she finds him standing in front of the window in his bedroom Jo thinks she knows him better than herself.

"I saw you walk up the road," he says without turning to her and Jo closes the door behind her, locking it with the switch.

"Laurie," Jo knows there is nothing she can say that will make anything less painful than it already is so she simply lays a hand on his arm.

"It's mine isn't it?"

Jo is watching the road though he now looks at her. She cannot insult him by asking 'what' and only swallows in the silence she wants to escape. Jo's hand slips from him and his are suddenly on her shoulders as he tries to turn her to him.

"Jo."

She shuts her eyes because she knows she will cry, she can feel it welling up within her and she hiccups as his lips find her forehead. He doesn't press her any further but holds her to him so tight she can't breathe between trying not to cry and the pressure in her chest.

Laurie's hand brushes the hair behind her ear as the other soothes her back and she feels as though there is nothing sadder than this. The wool of his shirt scratches at her cheek as she finally shakes with tears she can't stop and Jo's hands clutch at the back of his waistcoat.

"I'm-" she sobs, "-sorry."

He just holds her tighter.

"It's not your fault," he whispers. Jo cries harder.

She shouldn't be doing this. Shouldn't be here, shouldn't have come. She should have let them get on with their lives; let him go as she told him to five days ago. But it isn't as easy as that and she can't command herself to release his waistcoat and step away and tell him goodbye and go home and pretend it never happened.

There is so much she wishes she could pretend never happened.

A moment later she has herself under control and Jo pulls her head from his shoulder and wipes at her eyes. Laurie's shirt is wet but she hardly thinks it noticeable in the light, and she prays her sister thinks so too. Jo steps back, out of his arms and she knows he is watching her carefully, concern etched across his face but she will not meet his eyes.

"Jo," he starts but Jo steps back again and looks at the bed beside them, large and ominous.

"I'm s-" she stops herself from apologizing because she knows it will only pull him towards her again. "I have to go."

Jo takes one more step backwards and chances a look at his face. Laurie's eyes are dark but she can see the tears in his eyes even as he watches her back away. She really shouldn't have come.

"Don't worry," she says, turning around and reaching for the doorknob, her finger flicking the switch. She shuts her eyes for her words are like sand. "I'll be out of your way."

And it is further than she wants to be.

…

It has been a week and the house is empty. It is some time past four in the afternoon and Jo knows because she watches the clock above the door. The seconds hand ticks louder than a train in the room and she looks out the window to block her thoughts.

The boys will be back for dinner so she knows she must make her choice before six and it is simultaneously easy to time and the most difficult measurement she has ever known. Jo squeezes her folded hands together, keeping her eyes trained on the distant trees.

This is the time to cry if there ever has been one, and yet now she is strangely calm. Jo stands from the sofa that lies perpendicular to the window and walks to the end table. The box lays face up, black-and-white print staring at her in a mockery of commodities. She skips over the 'doctor's name and reads "guaranteed women's salvation" as though she has not seen it several times before. The dollar she paid will not be missed, for she was careful to use the savings she keeps in the drawer on her side of the bed. "Guaranteed women's salvation" Jo reads, again and again until she picks up the box and pulls the vial out once more.

Once more, she thinks with a disembodied determination.

Her eyes flick up and she catches herself in the mirror that hangs at the other end of the room between another bookcase and a flower stand. Jo recognises the angles in her face, the deep colour of her hair, but her eyes – surely they are another's. Those eyes stare back, empty and black like a pit she will fall into if she keeps looking.

Jo rolls the vial around in her hand and hears the soft clinking of the pills as they fall on each other. There are three; she has counted them all before and never looked at them long enough to know their true colour. She tears her eyes from the mirror and looks down to twist the lid open.

There is no going back and she is shaking. Finally the lid is freed and she opens her palm, tipping the small contents out onto it. Do I take them all? She wonders briefly before deciding that it does not matter. Jo places the vial by the box and takes a deep shaky breath.

She will have to do this one at a time if she must take them all.

Her throat is dry and her head swells. Jo rolls the three tansy pills in her hand and closes her eyes just once. She is careful not to touch anywhere near her stomach and practices instead to swallow. The ability she hopes she hasn't forgotten.

A single pill rolls between her index and thumb, the other two stay nestled in her palm as she holds it up to examine. It is only small, she decides. She can do this. She has to. The blood in her body travels south as she places the pill on her tongue and closes her eyes.

It is Laurie's face she sees in the dark, behind her eyes.

It tastes bitter on her tongue and Jo moves it to the back of her mouth and swallows, feeling every inch of its path down her throat. She almost chokes and feels the tight pain run all through her body as the pill surely does now. She is crying when she opens her eyes and looks wildly about the room.

Jo drops the rest of the pills and they scatter across the carpet rug, disappearing under the sofa and the little table. She sobs so hard her body racks with it as she stumbles towards the sofa, unable to keep the aching sound of her heart silent in the empty house. Jo collapses to the ground before the sofa and tucks her legs to her chest and honestly cries as she hides in the corner between the couch and the window.


	6. Chapter 6

He has spent the whole day thinking of her. He hasn't changed his shirt, hasn't said a word and he can feel Amy's worried eyes still on him though he faces the window and she sits in her chair.

"Maybe you should go back to bed," she suggests, thinking him ill he is sure.

"Mm," he says in a way that is neither 'yes' nor 'no'.

"Are you quite well?" Amy's sewing falls into her lap and he looks over his shoulder, nodding just once. "Truly Laurie?"

"Why don't you paint," he says and she looks at him with wide eyes. It is the only thing he has said to her all day aside from, "Good morning" and "Pass the butter" and she looks hurt but he can only see Jo's eyes in her face.

"Alright."

He turns around to watch her leave the room, the gentle swish of her dress a strange sound in the silence. Laurie's gaze falls to the sewing she left behind on the chair and he connects the material to an old memory of Jo patching his torn trouser leg as he still wore it. He remembers her jabbing the needle in to his skin 'quite by accident' after he told her what a dear she was and how she would make a wonderful wife for some undeserving man. He remembers the pleased smile on her lips as she finished the quick work and the way her thumb ran across his kneecap. He could see the part in her hair across the top of her head and Laurie recalls lamenting that she never wore it out anymore.

Laurie turns back to the window, his hands still in his pockets. Amy hasn't said anything about his dress and pate but he knows she's wanted to. He knows she's chalked it up to her sister's visit and hasn't the heart to lie to her, or inform her better of it.

He should see her, he knows. Jo wouldn't like it, but it would certainly settle this feeling he has in his gut, like something is fundamentally wrong with the way the sun hangs in the sky, or the stillness of the road. He has put it off already so long today, but the restlessness in his limbs is clouding his mind and he knows he has to see her. He has to.

So Laurie leaves without saying a word to Amy and knows he will not be missed for an hour or so. He grabs his coat jacket but forgoes a hat and sets off down the road without looking back.

…

The back door to the kitchen swings open with its usual high-pitched squeak, the clattering sound of the window glass embedded echoes about the quiet kitchen as he enters. Laurie has chosen the back way knowing Jo's preference for hiding out in this part of the house during the afternoon. He looks about the long room but sees it is empty and decides that the unnerving silence throughout the house means that her boys are out.

Good, he thinks and wipes his sweaty palms against his trouser-leg. He strides to the foyer, closing doors as he goes, thinking that if she is not in he will leave a note. It will be ambiguous of course but he hopes it tells Jo what she needs to hear and helps ease the anxiety that courses through his body. She'd been so distressed yesterday and there wasn't a damn thing he'd done about it. He hadn't even told her he would love this child.

Silently berating himself he marches into the cavernous room that is the foyer, the grand staircase that features calls to him and he stops dead before it. He can hear crying and if that isn't warning enough the tight knot in his stomach pulls hard.

He climbs the stairs two and then three at a time.

The crying is coming from the study. The door is hard to open and he remembers to jiggle the handle, shoving at the wood with his shoulder. It finally opens and he is thrust into the room, instantly spying Jo crying in front of the sofa against the far wall.

"Jo."

He walks towards her, deeply concerned for he has never seen her so upset. Laurie nears the couch and spots an unfamiliar box beside him on the end table. He picks it up reading 'Dr Caton's Tansy Pills' in thick black serif letters. The sub-text is not necessary and he drops the packet without regard, turning to Jo immediately. She is clutching her stomach and crying so hard her face is red.

Laurie falls to his knees beside her, taking her hands when she hides behind them, shoulders shaking painfully. "What have you done?" he asks, feeling as though the words are like rocks in his throat. He clutches her hands, leaning over her as she weeps bitterly.

"Jo!"

She looks up at him once, cheeks wet, lips curled in self-disgust and his heart is breaking when she finally reaches for him. He is at a complete loss and simply holds her, blinking back his own sudden hot tears as she shakes fiercely in his arms. He presses his cheek against her hair and her hands are on his back just like yesterday. The sun is in his eyes.

"Wh-" _Why_ he wants to ask but stops himself, knowing she has done this and it is killing her. She grips him tightly, as a great shudder passes over her and he can feel her heart beating erratically against his chest. He soothes her back, knowing nothing about tansy and everything about what it was meant to do.

"Jo," he can only say.

Twenty minutes of hard crying pass until the clock sounds, the simple bell deafening in the room. Jo sniffs, bringing her sleeve to her face but she does not pull back from Laurie and he keeps his hands steadily against her back, rubbing small circles. He wants to speak, to say something but nothing comes out. What can he say that wouldn't sound so trite or hapless?

In the end, Jo saves him the trouble. "I'm sorry," she says pulling away with a sniff, partially obscuring her face in her sleeve. "But the boys will be back in a few moments." Jo adjusts the little things that have become mussed and pats his shoulder as though nothing has happened and he is sitting on the floor like a fool.

Laurie takes her hands "Jo, don't" and she quickly looks away.

"I can't – not just now," she says so quietly he has to strain to hear.

"Don't" his hand tips her chin towards him and she is trying not to cry again. "What did – why did you –"

"I can't have that baby, Laurie." Jo's voice is low and throaty and ends with several more tears. His thumb stops brushing her jaw and he steps back in a flinch he can't disguise.

"Because of me?"

"Because of me!" she shouts, shoving a hand into her chest.

"I don't understand," and he really, really doesn't. "Jo –" he starts but she is convulsing, doubled over in pain. "Jo!"

She throws a hand out to ward him off but he's always been taller and stronger than Jo and he pulls her to him. "What's happening?" he wants to cry but worry makes him hold her pinched face instead.

"Effects," she says through clenched teeth.

"I don't understand. Why did you do this?!" Jo tries to push him away again but he holds her steadfast. "Tell me!"

"You know why!" she struggles against him before clutching her stomach again. "Oh!" Jo is in obvious pain and he stops his questions, knowing he isn't helping a bit.

"What can I do? How do we stop this?"

Jo pulls out of his grip to collapse to the sofa beside them, leaning heavily over her folded arms around her stomach. "Nothing!" her teeth are grit together and he watches her feeling completely useless, knowing nothing except that he is the cause of all this pain. He's done this to her.

"Jo," he wants to apologize, to tell her he loves her no matter what, to promise her he'll find a way for the baby to live and her to be well. But all of those things are stuck in his throat and she abruptly looks down at her lap in surprise.

"It's happened," she whispers. Laurie watches as she unwinds her arms and lifts her skirt – his favourite green dress – and he sees the blood instantly. Jo's hands are shaking and her legs squeeze together, trying to stop the horror show he witnesses.

Laurie's gaze flicks up and he sees Jo is as pale as a bed sheet. She looks like a ghost as she holds her skirt up with wide eyes and red lips. The blood is fast soaking the material around her and he wonders just how many pills she took, his hands clenching the cushion she sits on before him.

He has to do something.

"Alright," he says, more to himself than Jo whose hands he takes, pulling her to her feet. The blood drips from between her legs and he ushers her into the adjacent bedroom, sparing a quick look for the chamber pot as he takes her by the hand to the bathroom.

"Here," he places the pot on the cold tiles, helping her sit on it, her stained skirt smearing the ground as she lowers herself.

"Teddy," she says faintly, her hands grasping for his shoulders.

Laurie hovers over her, watching as the pot slowly fills with blood. "I'm right here." She looks up at him, her eyes heavy-lidded, her fingers pawing at the shoulder of his waistcoat.

"Ted–" Jo's eyes flutter shut as she leans forward, gasping - the sound of flowing blood like death in his ears. Time slows and he can feel his heart pumping as she slumps into his chest. Immediately he places a hand over her heart. Jo's pulse is weak and he can barely hear her breathing though she leans heavily against him.

"Jo," Laurie shakes her. "Jo, come on," he can hear the tears in his voice.

She attempts to say something and Laurie who lets his tears fall in relief welcomes the rasp from her throat. He rubs her back gently, feeling his legs cramp from his position. "Are you okay?" it's a stupid question to ask but if she can answer his prayers will be answered.

"No," her head shakes and he smiles briefly.

"When will it stop?"

Jo sounds terrified and he can't help but wonder the same thing. He has no idea about tansy other than its effect on the menses, his college friends having pointed out the ads as they sat around toast and sugar in the mornings. Will she survive this?

God let her.

Many minutes pass before the clock chimes two rooms away, startling them both. Jo blinks dazedly, tender pain across her brow as Laurie pulls away to look out at her bedroom. The bathroom is cool from the tiles but Jo's forehead is sweaty from nausea and he pulls out a handkerchief. She leans into his touch and he watches her face quietly, unable to stop himself from thinking her beautiful even now, after what she has done.

And what she has done indeed.

He looks back out to the room, expecting a flood of boys and one Professor to barge in at any moment but the house is still silent and a small part wishes they were here to help. He wonders what he would say. Laurie turns back to Jo who still rests her head in his hand, her eyes shut endeavouring to find some relief. She groans and he realises it has been a full five minutes since any new blood has joined the pot and he prevents Jo from closing her legs and falling in by pulling her to her feet.

"There we go," he says unsure if he means such an encouragement. It seems strangely hollow in this circumstance.

Her hands are still on his shoulders. "Wait," Jo turns around looking in the bloodied mixture of the chamber pot, and he watches, powerless to stop her as she determinedly bends down before it, covering her nose as vertigo and nausea surely swallow over her body. Jo's free hand nervously hangs over the pot before finding the smallest of treasures inside. Half-an-inch long it nestles in her hand when she pulls it from the blood and Laurie feels sick with recognition.

The head looks strangely oversized and though it is no bigger than a bean he sees the dark spots that are its eyes though it curls into itself. The tiniest signs of ears forming at the side of its head makes his heart shrink and he does not wonder when Jo starts to cry again, holding it close to her heart.

He can't watch anymore so he looks at the ceiling instead, thinking of two similar babies buried in the grove behind his house. With his hands in his pocket he can almost imagine this a simple mistake that time can fix – that he can fix. But nothing is simple and when Jo stands, eyes a raw red, and takes his hand from his pocket to lead him out of the chilly bathroom he follows willingly.

…

They stand side-by-side under the tree. Jo has made all the tiny arrangements for a tiny impromptu Christian burial and he doesn't think it a mockery though he can tell from her eyes she wonders if it is. Her hand hasn't left his though she still carries the dead in her other, its miniature body tucked inside a matchbox she collected from the kitchen counter.

Part of him wonders if she left it there that afternoon on purpose. A larger part of him doesn't care.

The sound of her breath carries across to him though the wind has finally picked up. The tree feels thick and heavy as it stands over them, as though the weight of their guilt, their sadness and happiness, the weight of their world is carried by it. He feels it in its shadow, he thinks.

Jo doesn't look much better but she stands as though the earth has planted her there. He will not let go.

He watches as she prepares herself for the words she won't remember from her father's book but knows in her heart. "I just want to-" she pauses when her tears look ready to take over. Collecting herself Jo starts again. "I want you to know how much we love you. If there was any other way, if I was a different person, if we lived a different life…"

He's not sure if her words make sense in light of what has happened that afternoon but he knows she means them. They are, after all, not for his benefit. Laurie looks to the box and thinks of the miniscule body inside. She has known and loved it longer than he, but he knows that one day, hell, one sentence is all it takes. He has loved this child from the moment he knew its existence. He has loved it before. And he has lost so much.

"We loved you very much," he says, voice as gravelly as it was two years ago with his last unborn daughter or son. He wishes he knew them.

A tear hits their joined hands and Laurie knows she is crying. He is too.

Jo bends down and begins to pull at the soil with her hands, the little matchbox sitting by. Her tears blind her and she strives on with quiet sobs. Laurie gets on his knees and joins her, feeling the grainy earth dig underneath his nails as he hollows out a hole, deep and wide enough for their child. The third time is no easier than the first or second and the hurt that wells in his chest is worse than ever. He wipes a sleeve across his eyes, never ashamed of a single tear.

Jo holds the small box in her shaking hands and lowers it in slowly. It feels as though this is the sum of their existence as the box is placed at the bottom and Jo's fingers caress the case one final time. Their dirty hands line the edge of that narrow hole as they peer down and Laurie thinks he will have one more to love in heaven.

"_I'm so sorry_."

…

It is a long way back to Plumfield. Laurie's arm is wrapped tightly around Jo's shoulders as they stride across the long grass and for the first time since everything started he is not thinking of her knees in the dirt and his fingers on her waist. He thinks of the child they have just buried and the castles Jo has forgotten and his own one that lies raised to the ground in the mistakes he's made.

He has no doubt this is entirely his fault.

Jo's expression looks torn as they walk, and he imagines her tears are cold chandeliers as they cut through the wind, falling behind them. He wonders if they carry to the child.

This once, he thinks, he deserves to be sentimental with her.

Laurie's throat still feels tight, though he cannot cry anymore and he wonders if this feeling will ever go away or if it will be like this forever. He will never forgive himself though he has already forgiven her. Something makes him wonder if he'd told her everything he should have yesterday that none of this might have happened.

There is so much he could have said, should have said, and so much he wishes he had. But time has robbed him of the chance and now, with things the way they were he thinks that he should be grateful for what he has, for time will surely take that too. His parents and his children are lost to him.

Her hand feels small where it clings to his right side, her arm around his middle as the other holds the bloodied spot over her front. She won't hold him again after today, he knows it and he won't blame her, though that sentiment he knows will fade when time makes this less like a blow to the gut and more like a sting to the hand. He knows because it is in his nature to love her irrationally and want her every moment of his life.

He wants to say something but he knows anything he might manage to work pass the knot in his throat will be lost to the wind. Perhaps it is better that way, he decides as they walk together with the wind against their faces and the child they buried behind them under a tree he will never forget.

_a/n: this story gets harder and harder to write. It's so depressing! I almost cried writing the funeral scene :S what is wrong with me, it's just a story._


	7. Chapter 7

Part II

Six months later

The end of winter is not as harsh as the last and the irony is not lost on Jo who sits with her back against the cold wall, the single window lighting the hallway a pale mirror into the outside world. The last of the snow has started to melt off the trees and yet Jo still feels cold and empty, like a shell. It would be easier, she thinks if she wasn't her sister's sister. It would be easier if the poison had taken hold of her.

Jo thinks about these things a lot.

Laurie sits opposite her, his fingers fiddling with the shape of each other as his eyes flick to the door at the other end of the corridor every now and then. She watches him and says nothing. She wonders when their roles were reversed and thinks that deep down inside they've both had it within. They are the same person.

He can't look at her and she knows that it's fine. She knows because she has been the wife with the husband whom she owes everything to. It's obvious what he owes Amy though it leaves a bitter taste in her mouth and a steady ache in her gut. She can't expect any more (or any less) from him and that is fine.

She just wishes that the distance of three feet between them wasn't so far.

A horrible wail comes from the room and both look up towards the noise, praying it is a good omen and not the sign of horror to come. Jo fears she will never know. Another part of her is glad of it.

"D'you think she's okay?"

Jo looks up at his contractions and knows he's nervous. He has every right to be with three children in the grave before their birth and if it hurts like a bludgeon to the head to think of them Jo won't show it. She smiles instead, a shadow of a smile though it is a well-meaning attempt to be reassuring.

"She has the best care, Laurie. I'm sure she's doing just fine."

He doesn't say anything back but scrubs his face tiredly. She watches as he pieces together a look of stability and strength and doesn't feel the struggle to tell him something more. That feeling has long since passed with fall and now the winter.

A moment passes before he reaches out a hand to her, across the gap between their sides of the hall. Jo realises she will have to stretch her own hand out and she swallows. He needs her, and that is why she's come. It was a selfish thing of him to ask but she has done it anyway, so Jo takes his hand and doesn't flinch. His hand feels clammy but warm – it has always been warmer than hers – and she remembers what it feels like to have those fingers drum softly against her ribcage.

Jo pulls back but he doesn't look like the lovelorn boy of twenty-something and looks more of the grateful father-to-be that he is. She hopes that one of them at least will know happiness in this lifetime, and it feels like the most childish, idealistic thought she's ever had but she means it.

She knows it won't be her.

Another cry calls from the room but it is soon hushed and Jo wonders if this is the most silent birth she has witnessed. It wouldn't surprise her for Amy has always been quiet in her control and Jo supposes it must demand great concentration through pain. Jo's mind inevitably turns to her own pain and for once she lets it wash over her, if only to pretend she could know her littlest sister a little better. She knows that in part it is a lie as much as she knows she should have been the one in the bed, husband waiting anxiously outside.

The anxious husband she has, though he worries for her health and not any child's. Jo worries she has grown to resent his comfort and concern, his infinite understanding when the person she needs most is sitting opposite thinking of her sister and the natural order has returned. It is like a knife always at her throat.

Jo folds her hands and swallows. If she closes her eyes she will see the tiny bloodied form of someone she has denied existence to, and that is as painful as the presence of the man who is not quite her husband or her brother. Instead she looks back to the window, white with glaring light it is as though the holy ones wait for the coming of this child. The same ones will swallow her when she leaves this house to its new happy family.

Its this new dramatic side of her she hates. She hates the self-pity and hatred and insufferable woe that she has wrought for she does not even deserve these sanctuaries.

A new sound, the newest in the world is heard back to her right, behind the door that separates this mysterious birth from the two in the hall and Jo can't breathe as she listens. Her eyes flick to Laurie whose gaze is filled with wonder and impossible hope.

The knife scrapes a little closer, but she cannot begrudge him for it.

A smile washes across his face and the door at the end of the corridor opens with its soft, old creak and Hannah appears with a smile so tender Jo wishes she could feel it too. "The bah-bee is here," she says to Laurie with tears in her eyes and the tall man stands, squaring his shoulders for the wonders ahead. Jo will wait, she will sit forgotten as he enters the room and breaks into the most genuine of roles the fates have cast him. She will finally close her eyes as she hears him weep for joy and speak lowly to the pair he will forever know as family. She will have to enter in minutes and whisper her congratulations with real tears in her eyes meant for someone else and her sister will smile and hold her hand out for Jo, knowing without knowing what it does to her to be there for them all.

When she walks home it rains and her skirt is stained with mud. Her boots are harder to walk in, caked with the thick dirt of the road between the heel and sole but the steady pour hides her cries well and lessens the shame just a little.

…

The room is stuffy but warm as she lies between piles of blankets and the familiar feeling of suffocation overcomes her, just for a moment. It is enough to open her eyes, coughing from the feel, and she looks around the sullen bedroom tiredly. Everything she does makes her feel even more tired if it were possible. Jo's husband sits in the corner, watching her though for a moment she almost calls him 'Teddy' before closing her eyes and falling asleep once more.

…

Pneumonia she remembers a few days later, she has contracted pneumonia. The pewter bowl sits, half under the bed and she spies the lancet on the dresser beside the chair Fritz has occupied the past several days. Sharp jabbing pains strike her chest and she quickly lies back down, glad that they are not as persistent as before. She should never have walked back as she had from the Laurences'.

The alternative was no better.

Jo stretches her hand to the bedside table for the tonic she knows is waiting for her to take. At least this disease is near its end, she thinks without real gladness. The liquid tastes like poison as it slides down her throat but she swallows it still, with the same, ever-present tightness that accompanies that action since that awful day.

The cut on her arm stings a little but she takes little notice of it, wanting only to sleep to escape the ache in her chest and stifled air around the now-empty bedroom.

…

It's midday and the sun sits at its zenith as she washes the dishes from breakfast, a messy ensemble of plates and bowls and unfinished cups of milk. The warmth of the water is soothing and though the doctor had declared her 'fine' four days ago, Jo still feels so tired.

The plain porcelain clanks lazily about in the sink and she takes a moment to look out the window at the beautiful day God has given her. It is like a dream, the sparse field alight with colour, the snow completely gone though it should look as dull and lifeless as the trees that line the drive do. She wonders if she really is dreaming as she spots a figure coming around the side of the house, his gait as familiar as her own.

Laurie spots her a moment later as he pulls to a stop. He blinks once and she knows he is unsure and surprised but the greatest emotion that plays across his face is concern. She knows she has not seen him since the birth and she has the pneumonia to thank for that. She knows also now that he has blamed himself – it is written across his face.

He makes no motion to continue to the door and instead with a single look, their silent conversation through the window is finished and he leaves the way he came.

He doesn't owe her anything Jo tries to remind herself as she scrubs viciously at the bowl between her hands, the soapy bubbles irritating the cut on her arm.

…

The baby is named after Beth. Little Bess is as pale as her aunt once was, lying in the last days before she met her Maker and Jo cannot take her eyes of the girl. She is so small and so quiet that she seems like a doll, lost in the frills and white laces of her numerous blankets less she catch chill in the early spring.

Her parents cradle her closely, reluctant to give her up to even Marmee who shows the girl the same care she gave to her daughters. Amy watches everyone and everything around Bess without blinking, she is more observant than even her artistic notions might grant her as she guards her daughter diligently. Marmee spares her a knowing look before her gaze falls to Jo who stands to the side silently watching on.

Laurie's hands never leave Amy's shoulders except to hold Bess and Jo would rather see the look in his eyes than her mother's and she watches his face instead carefully. There is a bliss that is so perfect and abandoned it seems almost a sin were it not on his face. He has found his home and heart and she fits entirely within his hands and it is entirely humbling.

Jo knows she loves this Bess.

When it comes time for her to hold the baby Jo feels everyone holding his or her breath. It is not as dramatic as that, Jo decides, taking Bess from Laurie to hold against her chest, a smile, her first real smile breaking across her face as the little girl snuggles closer to Jo's warmth, her tiny mouth making small noiseless words. Jo bounces her a little, turning from her family to hold back a choking sob and she feels Laurie's eyes on her, even when Amy comes to swoop her daughter back, sharing a smile with Jo for the blessed wonder that is little Bess.

"We should really be going home," Amy says with the baby in her arms. "It's time for tea and bed I think?" She looks to her daughter who remains passive though Laurie leaves the room to find their things and prepare the buggy. The days have been bright and dry enough for driving with the newborn and Orchard House had never stopped being the central home for its three daughters

"Laurie," Jo has followed him outside, a small number of Bess' spare blankets in her hands and they are alone.

He stops tying the horse to the wheeled seat behind it and turns his head before pulling away from the animal entirely. His face is full with unsaid and very wanted things but Jo lowers her eyes before she approaches him further. His hands hang in the space she leaves between them and Jo knows he would rather touch her just now. His baby's blankets are still in her hands.

"Jo I…" she finally looks up at him and he swallows, gaze moving back to the house as frustration creases his brow. Laurie shifts his weight and she is reminded of a much younger boy who had preferred to own up to stealing trinkets instead of feelings with that same stance. "I'm sorry I didn't come in the other day. I should have but, well… I hadn't told Amy. I just wanted to see if you were better. Amy said you had pneumonia."

"So I did," she feels silly for the frown that crosses her face at the idea of his reporting to Amy like a soldier to his queen. He should, Jo tells herself sternly, for all the non-reporting they'd done. Amy deserved his honesty.

"Here," she says passing the blankets at a loss for further conversation. He takes them blankly and they stand together like stiffs.

"Thank you," he gestures at the blankets and she nods, turning to go back to the house and pretend like this never happened.

She manages two steps before he stops her. "Jo wait," he calls out, a hand flying to her arm. He spares two seconds to look up at the windows of the house before he kisses her and she feels like she has been physically struck. It isn't long but it isn't quite a peck either and Jo thinks it's everything she's needed for so long. Too long. She leans in.

He pulls back, looking at the house again and the desperate look of failure and guilt that steals its way over his face is more than enough for her to walk away even though he still lingers over her, Bess' blankets held tightly in his hands.


	8. Chapter 8

He watches her sweet little face as she sleeps. Her nose, so small is still her mother's and a trivial part of Laurie categorises the difference in edge to her aunt's before he pulls away from the cradle to stare at his bare feet on the cold wooden floor. These thoughts should be far from his mind, but as every day passes he finds he is not above them.

Laurie pushes old feelings down inside as the ache in his chest grows. He crosses his arms, affecting a calm indifference for no one. It still hurts though.

Half a year ago he buried such a small thing it could hardly be called a body, but it was _somebody_ to him and as he sits with his baby he can't help the guilty feeling that he could have done something. He should have said something, stepped faster, held tighter – anything so that tiny somebody might be lying in another crib down the road.

Jo would have someone too, he thinks. Laurie knows the look he saw in her eyes as she passed Bess to her mother and he knows that she spends her time haunting the study at Plumfield like some soulless ghost. Her boys have told him as much and though Jo's husband says nothing, everyone worries. To them she has miscarried a child and it is only a depression that won't shake until she tries again.

He knows better.

His sigh fills the cavernous, silent room as the two he calls family sleep on.

…

A small but firm hand shakes him awake and he blinks rapidly, worry for the baby instantly filling his slow senses.

"What?! What is it?" He twists to face his wife who is sitting on the edge of the bed a little too calmly.

"Oh Teddy dear," she starts but in his half-alert state he clamps a hand on her wrist and warns, "_Don't_" in such a bitter voice that she stops. Amy gives him a long look before he realises what he has said and both pull hastily away.

"Your daughter just laughed."

Laurie remembers their promise about developments and processes this news. "When?" he asks, feeling not a little bad about growling at his wife for such a start to the day.

"Oh five or so minutes ago." Laurie watches as she busies herself, straightening her dressing gown and moving to Bess whose cradle sits against the wall opposite their bed. She runs her hand over the baby's head cooing and singing broken pieces of nursery rhymes and the worst bit is Laurie can hear her struggling not to cry.

He falls back on his pillow and closes his eyes, cursing his moronic mouth. Months of playing the dutiful, respectful and doting husband have been eradicated with one word. "Amy," he says and she stops half-singing. "I'm sorry."

Silence follows his apology and he runs a hand across his face, eyes still shut. "I really didn't get much sleep last night." He offers as an excuse and when Laurie sits up he sees that she has taken it as truth as she measures his defeated posture.

"I understand," she says, though really he knows she shouldn't and she has every right to be mad at him. She turns and lifts Bess from her cradle, wrapping her arms around the baby in such a motherly way he feels more like a beast with her every step. "I'll let you go back to sleep then, Laurie. Bess needs to be fed."

His wife slips past their bed to the door, giving him a smile as she closes the door behind her and the sun begins to rise. Laurie lies down again and listens to the sound of her feet against the wood in the corridor and wishes he knew what she was saying to their daughter as she hums and mumbles.

He forgets that is the first time in six months he has used her name without an audience.

…

Breakfast has no longer been an affair since the arrival of Bess and it is no surprise that Laurie does not see his wife at all that morning as they come and go about their separate routines – seeing to business and seeing to baby.

He eats a scraping of toast off an enormous platter left by their cook who he knows will report to the lady of the manor that he is still not eating properly. One slice is almost too filling.

Laurie enters his study, wiping the crumbs off his suit-jacket before going through the small pile of letters on his desk. Two turn out to be nothing but reports and logistics as the other is a notification of yet another meeting that he already knows he is late to, something which has become a bit of a habit.

Having a baby, Laurie thinks as he throws the letters back on the desk, has more advantages than he first realised.

He crosses to where the window is dark with its heavy curtains and thinks of another pair, rich with red and velvet at his grandfather's and another March crouching at his side, peering through them. Pulling the string at the side he makes quick work of opening the curtains and daylight floods the dark, almost overbearingly wooden study he spends more than most days in.

Stuffing his hands in his pockets, Laurie stands before the window and takes stock of the day. The rose bushes are still as frosty and bare as the large maple that stands in the front yard. For something so impressive in autumn it whimpers in the brisk spring morning as winter stretches the cold of its fingers over the earth. The road looks muddy and he doesn't wonder if the horse will need a good clean when he comes home later tonight.

He doesn't envy the servant who will have that job ahead of him.

His own work comes to the fore of his thoughts and Laurie wonders across the study towards his desk. There are a few folders that will need to accompany his trip to the Boston office and he pulls them out of the deep bottom drawer before he falls listlessly into the mahogany chair his grandfather chose for him when he first started in the business.

This is his life, he thinks miserably as his hand traces the cover of the files in front of him. The paper is so unlike the manuscripts he used to toil over, so unlike Jo's old plays and Amy's childhood sketches that he feels lost as he touches them. These reports are what they need him for – without them Laurie knows he would be about as useful as the green card that stops the pen marks from scratching into the rich wood of his desk.

Propping his elbow upon the desktop, he leans on his hand and lets his eyes wonder back to the window thinking not of the reports beneath his right hand but of the tight curve of Jo's hip.

It has been a whole two months since he last thought of her body in such a way and part of him is relieved he hasn't really made any progress in replacing thoughts of her form with that of his wife's. He is selfish, he knows but self-awareness does not stop his adolescent musings and he finds himself recalling some of their more adventurous lovemaking as the sun slowly makes its way through the bare maple branches.

Laurie replays the feeling of Jo's breast in one hand, the taste of her neck, the sounds she would make when he swiped his tongue and grazed his teeth against the spot behind her ear. All these things he gives himself liberty to relive behind the black of his closed eyelids, his hand a fist on the reports.

But daylight is distracting for such imaginings and Laurie soon stirs himself into action, piling his reports into a satchel. He pulls the strap over his head and moves back to the curtains once more, sparing a split of a moment to think of the colour of Jo's skin were she wrapped in such heavy material. Quickly he tugs the string the opposite way and the curtains pull shut with the scraping of their wooden fixtures above his head.

The study is dark and he stands in the blackness wishing he didn't have to go to Boston. Wishing he wasn't his grandfather's grandson. Wishing he wasn't his wife's husband. Wishing he wished none of these things. Laurie's hand adjusts the strap that lies across his chest and he leaves the room, closing the door behind him with only one final look into that dark sanctuary of a room where his dreams will wait for him tomorrow.

…

The box that takes him to the station is small and cramped. His hat is clutched in one hand and the other rests on top of the satchel, both of which sit on his lap as he watches the passing trees rush by.

The pines stand tall alongside the road and for once he is glad to see something living in this still-barren landscape. His life has felt so empty and he finds himself filling it with scenery and trees and snow, enough to line the bottom of his soul as the empty hollow keeps stretching and straining for something more (more than Bess and he swells with the guilt and honesty). There are things he can never have and so the ache, he knows, will continue with or without the trees.

He thinks it a distinctly Jo-ish thing to do. And so he keeps on.

The green of the pine needles are no greener than the old chair in his grandfather's library and he thinks of the times he spent reading in that tall, stuffy room. He remembers catching Brooke, a book on Shakespeare in hand as disguise, looking out the large windows that faced Orchard House, spying for Meg who was known to hang the washing at that time of the day on Wednesdays. Laurie laughed at him and poked good fun until old Brooke swiped him on the back of the head with that Shakespearean critique and pointed to his sums that hadn't been half-finished.

He recalls the way Jo would throw herself onto the chair, a Dickens' to arm herself when Laurie sat at her feet and played with the edging of her pinafore as she struggled to read on – citing his ever-possible failure if he didn't stop and pay attention, knowing full well Dickens wasn't on his reading list for any of the courses that semester.

Beth was once caught on that chair that seemed to engulf her size, sometime after her first bout with the fever. He remembers trying not to scare her into leaving as he crept into the room to sit and watch her read his father's old cuttings of Margaret Fuller's essays in _the Dial_. Most of all he remembers Beth's dreamy smile as she read about Beethoven's music in America, her small feet tucked under her in that giant chair that seemed to swallow her up.

Laurie smiles at the memories and thinks more about the stirrings of youth and that leather chair as the dark greens and whites of winter's end swirl and pass him by.

…

The streets are empty when he leaves the tall building that houses the Boston office. A cold wind sweeps past and he tugs his overcoat closer. His satchel thumps against his side with every stride closer to the station. A part of him wonders if he should have taken the offer for a cab to the train station but he knows he needs this walk to clear his mind if he should be approachable for his wife.

His gloved hands burrow into deep pockets and he steps easily with long legs that Jo used to tease him were like a locust's. He smiles thinking of her imitating both the creature and his own walk with such an animated face that one could not think the woman he saw two weeks ago was the same. Laurie frowns and walks a little faster.

The south station is not far and he sees it, wide and stately with its columns and flat roofs that allude to places not of this nation. He thinks of Rome and Italy and lying on the grass with a fat cigar hanging out of his mouth as Amy sketched him out of bitterness or desire, or simple study he no longer remembers. The building is not so grand as those places though and he quickly concentrates on retrieving his ticket and standing on the platform like a gentleman with his bag against his hip and his hat pulled over his brow.

These patterns in his life, he considers as the train pulls up and he holds the door open as three ladies alight with their skirts in hand and the breadth of their nets squeezing through, they have become shadows, echoes of his past experiences and he cannot escape these memories so long as he attempts to make nothing of the present.

Laurie boards the train and sits by the window, hoping the sights he might glimpse in the evening light will drive him from his mind. He knows it won't work but he can try. He is trying, Laurie convinces himself, not to catch himself in patterns, watch for the shadows and listen for the echoes. He is trying to be a father and a husband and not be hopeless and pathetic and a shade in the afternoon that has become his life.

It is all a lie in the end, Laurie clutches his satchel closer, his hat sitting beside him, forgotten like so many of the things that have become peripherals in his drama. The people he doesn't see, not even once a week, they are all standing at the back of the stage with him, talking amongst themselves - ignoring him as he ignores them - as Amy plays her part in a screaming white dress, their baby in her arms and they are just archetypes and not people to him. Jo sits in the wings and he can't look for her for his cue is coming and he will have to set foot on that stage: his house.

A whistle sounds and his metaphor falls to pieces as the train shudders in to a stop and Laurie realises he drifted asleep. He feels foolish so he picks up his hat and fiddles with the brim as he stares out the window into the black night but sees only his face in the reflection.

_A/N: it's been a while!__ Sorry it's so tragically short, but man, there's only so much angst!Laurie I can take if you know what I mean. You can blame Sartre's 'Nausea' for the turn in my metaphors in this one. Bloody existential essays that I still need to start :s_


	9. Chapter 9

He wants to take her pain away, Jo repeats in her mind. She knows it's true and yet with each gentle thrust, though he holds her like porcelain, she is breaking. He wants to take her pain away. This is why they are making love in the middle of the night and she is choking back tears and he can't look at her face.

The sensation of bile is in her throat, caught, sitting there like a lump of lead, slowly poisoning her. She has deserved this discomfort. It is minor, she tells herself, lying a hand across the broad spectrum of his shoulders. He should know at least she is grateful that he tries, that he wants to do this at all is a mark of the kind of man he is.

Her husband.

Suddenly his hips shudder and she runs the tips of her nails down the centre of his back and she knows he has come and she no longer has to keep her eyes shut and swallow all of this like some sort of self-flagellation. How can she act like such a martyr? It sickens her more.

Friedrich grunts lightly as he moves off her to lie so close beside her, an arm wrapped around her waist as though it will seal the deal. Jo shuts her eyes again and rolls away from him, silently crying now though she can feel his peaceful smile against her back, his arm still tight like a vice.

Please God, she prays though she knows she has no right anymore, let him think he has done me right.

"I love you Josephine," he whispers in that gruff German voice she knows better than her own these days. She swallows hard, hoping to swallow any trace of tears.

"I love you too." And she does. Only it is too little, too late.

…

Jo tries harder to be a real person the next day. She throws her heart into cleaning, scrubbing the kitchen floor with such vigor that her hands and arms turn red with the force. Fritz smiles at her, kisses her cheek and tells her, as he does everyday "Everything will be well," his 'w's terribly 'v'-like. She scrubs a little harder and her wrist seizes up.

She kneels in the suds, holding her aching wrist as she looks up at the sky through the kitchen window. Time holds no meaning for her anymore. Clouds are passing overhead and the earth keeps turning and she sits there, just sits, the soapy water soaking through her pinafore, through her dress, through her first petticoat, the second, the third (it is now spring), her stockings, her drawers. A part of her feels as though she is melding with the floor. She needs to be scrubbed clean, wiped free of the dirty water, so clean before it touched her.

The maid takes away her sponge twenty minutes later when she finds her kneeling in the kitchen. She has nothing to say to Mother Bhaer. She lifts the pail of water and soap and empties the bucket outside the back door. She puts it all away and Jo still kneels on the kitchen floor, looking up out the window.

The sun moves from one side of the house to the other, the water clings like ice and still Jo doesn't move. She is left alone and she watches the clouds until her husband returns home.

…

"Jo," he is gripping her shoulders too hard but she won't tell him it hurts. "Jo, dear." She can hear the running water behind her; filling the tub she knows her husband will ask her to sit in, to warm herself. It is cold but she can't find the strength to move. To feel.

The maid is unbuttoning her pinafore and all she feels is the pressure of her thick fingers, prodding into her back with every button. Fritz holds her from in front and is looking at her as though she is trapped behind a brick wall. What, she wants to ask him, what, what, _what_.

"Come now," he seems to settle on saying, though she reads much more in his eyes she doesn't ask him. He pulls her pinafore off and she can feel the maid has already started on her dress. Her underclothes are pulled down and she is standing naked, propped up before them like the china doll that stood on the dresser in front of Beth's bed when they were children. It stood there until Amy knocked it down, fighting with Jo over whose turn it was to read Father's book.

Amy couldn't even read, Jo recalls.

She has been dragged to the bath and now lies in it, covered up to her neck in such hot water it stings her skin all over. Her legs and waist are numb from the shock and she blinks, looking for Fritz. He stands in the doorway; talking to the maid he has pushed into the corridor. She doesn't wonder what they are saying; she knows it is about her.

She wants to cry again.

Fritz will turn around though and she will be caught. He will know what is written across her face and she will have no choice but to dunk her head under the water and hold it there until the soap penetrates the deepest cells of her body. Until she is the water and God will take her back.

Jo doesn't realize she has done it until she is spitting out water and her husband is holding her and it is cold again. She has soaked his jacket through.

…

The bed feels like a box, pressing into her from all sides but she hasn't the strength to move, to push it away from her. Jo lies there and thinks about these things, these feelings but they are hard to piece together and she just shuts her eyes.

She should be trying to get on with her life, she thinks. She should be trying to think of something, of someone that will make her want to get up and face the day, face those clouds that pass interminably overhead without her will. Jo pictures the face of her mother, pictures her father, her Beth, John's Meg, Meg's children, Amy…

She can't think of Laurie. She won't think of him.

Jo rolls over to face the other side of the bed, pressing her face into the pillow. Her husband's side is empty and briefly she wonders where he is. Then she remembers it is midday and the sun is shining through the lace curtains from her side of the room for a reason. It shouldn't be so confusing, she thinks.

Time makes no sense to her now.

…

"You must be careful, Jo." Her husband's hand strokes her hair out of her face and it feels so soothing she worries she will fall asleep before he finishes. She has only just woken. "Herr Doktor says you are still weak from the pneumonia, liebchen. You must be careful."

She closes her eyes and feels guilty that his concern feels more like a lecture. She knows, _she knows_, Jo wants to tell him, but his hand is like a warm muff against her ear, his fingers so smooth and gentle that she cannot form the words.

"Don't cry, Jo."

He mumbles something in German before the warmth of his hand is taken away and she can hear him move across the floor of their room. She does not open her eyes.

He pauses in the doorway, she knows because the wood groans under the shift of his weight. Jo imagines he is leaning against the doorframe, looking across at her but she cannot bring herself to turn over and smile at him. It is too much, and then he leaves.

Tomorrow, she promises herself, she will get up and surprise him with a kiss. She will smile and cook breakfast – something harmless like toast – and put the washing on the line and not look for the trees in the outer field. She will run about with the boys and she will put them to bed and be the wife she knows she can be.

She will not think of Laurie.

…

Tomorrow comes and goes. Another tomorrow comes, another tomorrow goes, and then another and another. Her life becomes a series of tomorrows, parading through without much pomp and no circumstances and Jo lies in bed and feels like nothing very much.

Fritz brings her warm milk and it doesn't help. He holds her at night and it doesn't help. The boys write her stories and it doesn't help. The maid stares at her as though she has lost her mind and is nothing but a stretch of clothes and flesh to be pitied. And it doesn't help.

…

Eventually she feels sick.

It is not the nausea of guilt, but something else entirely. It is something she thought she would forget forever and it rushes over her like cold water until she is throwing back the sheets and running for the bathroom. She vomits into a pot, nothing but liquids and hot, searing bile. Everything tastes like acid and she vomits more. She vomits until there is nothing left in her stomach except a raw, tender feeling and she is shaking, her face red and hot like her throat.

Jo stands, away from the pot beside the bath and stares at herself in the mirror. She is standing, she is standing by herself and although there are flecks of yellow sick in her long unbound hair she is smiling. She is so thin and she is smiling and holding the front of her nightdress.

She knows what this feeling is. She is having a feeling and she knows what it is.

She is pregnant.

…

The doctor comes and she remembers his visit. It is no longer a blur when he performs such strange tests, feels for a fever and tells her to eat more, to rest as much as she needs, but please eat more. It is a circumstance. She remembers her husband escorting him out, never taking his eyes off her. She remembers sitting in bed and blinking and feeling so strange but… and she dares to feel it… happy.

It is like a spell has been lifted off her. She feels and she feels and it is feeling that makes her happy.

Fritz returns with a bowl – "stew" he informs her with such a doting smile – and she eats. It isn't much but it is something. She swallows three whole spoonfuls of it and drinks so much water that she feels full. She likes to feel full and she knows she is on her way back to normal.

Tomorrow is coming and for once she feels like it.

…

Nothing improves quick enough for her. Jo does not return to work about the house within the week, she still eats too little and sleeps too much but things are changing. She begins to put on weight again, she begins to sit up, out of bed on her own volition, she begins to see day and night. Most of all she begins to feel again.

Jo is by the window and she watches her boys run in the field below. It is a much-welcomed sight as they tag each other and run about giggling and shouting to each other. It is late in the afternoon and the sun will finish setting within half an hour but she watches them contentedly.

Supper will come soon and she will join them tonight. She will clear an entire plate and smile at her boys. Jo will be part of her family again and it thrills her.

She has discovered the little joys in her life since her sickness and she has come to treasure them all the more. How could she have wanted to throw all of them away when they mean so much to her, always meant so much to her? She clouded her mind with one situation, Jo decides, looking down at the boys being rounded up by Fritz to ready them for supper (and her). One situation in her life was allowed to overshadow the rest and she feels more ashamed of that than Fritz says she should.

He tells her the shame and guilt are passing things, like the sickness itself and she will soon be better and feel silly for even feeling them. She tries not to laugh at his delusion and thanks him earnestly instead. He cares so much for her and she loves him so much and she tries to hold onto the feeling every waking moment. If she can just keep the feeling alive in her heart long enough it might erase every thought and feeling she had before the sickness.

In a way it has become a turning post in her life. Without the sickness she might have continued down that dark path, thinking only of the man she refuses to think of, that thinking overshadowing every good and honest thing she had and has at Plumfield.

Thinking of what she has Jo stands to dress herself for supper, a hand on her slowly increasing waistline. It has been two month since the sickness and she has begun to fill out and it is touching to know that this child is no lie. It comforts her when her husband holds her at night to not have to lie, to not have to hide. To hold this child in her heart without guilt, to imagine, just for a while that this child will fix everything in her life.

The turning post, she realizes is actually the child.

Jo dresses in a plain brown dress, pins her hair in a net and stands before the floor-length mirror smoothing imaginary wrinkles away. She cannot fool herself. Everything in the past, every lie, every sin, every moment still counts.

She is lying to herself to get on.

Jo steps away from the mirror and opens the bedroom door, heading downstairs to sit with her boys. That newfound lightness in her step has gone and she plasters a well-practiced smile on her face and starts her life again.

…

It is hot during the middle of the day now and spring is hardening for summer. She wears only two petticoats today and is washing the clothes. Her arms are deep in the outdoor sink, sleeves rolled up as the maid takes the cleaned articles to the line and pins them up. Her stomach is swollen though small and it is uncomfortable to lean over the sink like so but it helps keep her mind off of what day it is.

A letter arrived for her that morning, odd enough that it was not sent through the post but when Jo saw the pointed scrawl of her name on the envelope there was not so much mystery but a sickened realization. She'd excused herself from breakfast and escaped to the study by the bedroom upstairs.

Jo drops the last of the clothes for the maid and pulls a smile for the woman before taking the now empty basket indoors. She is trying not to think of the day but the letter keeps coming to mind and she stops in the kitchen, the basket against her hip.

That letter had been the hardest letter to open. She'd looked out the window over the desk to the field lined with trees and swallowed. The envelope was small and light in her hands but her throat was scratchy and her hands shook just a little. Jo steeled herself and pulled the flap out of the back – it hadn't even been sealed – and reached in. Her fingers froze at the contents before she managed to pull them out. A small pressed flower and a yellowed note lay in her hand.

Jo puts the basket down beside the door – she will need it later for when she takes the clothes off the line. She smoothes her hands down the front of her pinafore, letting the cotton soak the remaining suds off her arms before she pulls her sleeves down, suddenly feeling cold. Jo looks around the kitchen for something, _anything_ to do but is met with order and completeness.

"No," she pleads with herself, but her legs are already walking her out the kitchen, up the stairs and towards the study.

She opens the study door and the letter and its contents are right where she left them in the morning, propped on the desk, covered in sunlight. Jo turns and locks the door behind her though no one shall disturb her for lessons are on and her husband is teaching math.

Jo sits at the desk and opens the letter as she had before, staring at the gentle effort of its sender. She drops them to the desk and buries her face in her hands. It is too much. The past is catching up to her again and she is stuck in time.

The azalea's faded colour almost matches the colour of her skin in the sun and she stares at it, wondering how long he kept the flower. How long has he planned to send it, or was it one in Amy's collection he saw only a few days ago before deciding to send it to her. Jo's eyes switch to the note, folded over once carefully. She pushes it open and stares at his neat script, thick from a new pen undoubtedly chosen by her sister and she hates it and hates that she hates it.

It reads:

'Take care this day

-the Lawrence Boy'

She wants to scrunch it up and throw it as far from her as possible. It is too sweet, it is too perfect it is just what she needs and didn't want to know.

Her child should have been born today.

Jo does not tear the little note up though. She does not crunch it into a little ball and throw it in the paper wastebasket beside her, filled already with her husband's unfinished letters to her mother.

She sits, holding it between her thumb and two fingers, trying to remember the feeling of its maker's hands. She stares at the flower and the note and tries to remember what it was to be the centre of the world to the man she loved but it was so long ago and so much has happened that all she can conjure up is the looks of his nails, short and blunt set in such long fingers made to play pianos. Made to drum against her skin.

But she cannot remember the feeling.

The note is folded and tucked back in the envelope and Jo looks up, back to the window before her, eyes scanning for the tallest tree, the one with the little body buried beneath. She has consciously avoided finding that tree for so long that when she sees it she knows she is already crying. Three slightly smaller trees from her view surround it and she knows they have grown since her last visit. _Their_ last visit.

Jo picks up the flower and leaves the house, thinking she won't be missed for a few hours. It is better they don't know she is crying again anyway.

…

The tree feels bigger than she remembers and when the wind rushes through it, bending the thinner branches at its edge, rattling its leaves she feels as though the tree is passing judgment on her.

She kneels in front of the unmarked grave; placing the little vase Meg gave her two years ago for Christmas on top. Now there is visible evidence of her murder, Jo thinks, tears blurring her vision. Laurie's pressed flower is joined with three daisies she picked from the path outside the kitchen door and though there is much sentiment in the action Jo thinks it right.

"So much has changed," she says to the wind. She wipes her sleeve across her eyes and stares up at the boughs of the tree. It is a little easier to see the bark and leaves, the undeniable strength within the tree than her mistakes on the ground.

"You can't be replaced," she says at last, laying a hand on her abdomen. It helps to make these small statements for everything she says sounds so big, so final as the wind greedily swallows it up.

"And I can't ever be sorry enough."

Jo looks back down to the little vase, the small flowers dance around, quivering as she lets her tears fall freely. There is no use in pretending she is strong and hard and made of mettle that can't be shaken. She killed her baby and carries another and although the order of the world should be returning her heart is begging for everything to be different.

She hates herself and nothing has really changed. It is only getting easier. Time is making the hate softer, its constancy makes it dull and she tries, she tries so much for control. Everything in her past is still real. And she has the time to accept that.

She misses everything that never happened. Everything that could have happened and should have happened.

She misses Laurie.

…

The whole of summer passes and Jo makes an effort to see no one but her husband and the boys she lives with. Her mother visits her two times, but her age hinders the desire to see Jo more and her daughter understands. In truth, she is grateful for her mother has always symbolized virtue, honesty and everything good in the world and it hurts to see her. She doesn't feel good enough, doesn't feel like she is the daughter her mother raised her to be and when she waves goodbye it is a relief.

She is more comfortable hiding with herself.

Autumn passes too and she sees no one then either. She has to write more letters and it helps when she is sick for it all feels like less of a lie to have such an excuse to keep her in bed and away from her family guests. She lies in bed and listens for their familiar voices below, her husband's the most recognizable of them all.

Only once does she hear Laurie and he is laughing, "Bess," she hears him laugh and she wonders what the little girl looks like now. She won't find out though – not tonight - and she pulls the blankets tighter around her and closes her eyes, feeling the child within her move as she does.

It won't be much longer.

Later she hears the door open and the sound of feet shuffling against the carpet rug. The other side of the bed lowers and the slats creak with the new weight. Cold feel touch hers and a warm hand lies against her belly. A throat clears and she knows it is Fritz and a moment later he is snoring softly, a warm body against her back.

Jo smiles because this is familiar. This is her life now and she can live with it.

…

It is Thanksgiving. Jo is round with child and wearing a dark green dress, so thick in the colour she feels like it is already Christmas. Fritz smiles at her as they set the long table, the beautiful table cloth a present from her mother, the silverware their wedding present and the glasses from Friedrich's homeland. Everything looks warm and inviting and as she rubs an absent-minded hand over her stomach that her nerves are all gone.

She can face her family tonight. And she won't be ashamed.

Fritz kisses her cheek as he places the final plate in front of the chair she stands before and the edges of his beard scratch lightly against her skin. "Your cheeks are so red, Josephine," he notes and she smiles, straightening his collar.

The children are upstairs getting ready and she feels like home is the most wonderful place on earth. "They have reason to be, dearest," she says, still smiling. She leans forward and Fritz captures her lips. Their kiss is slow and gentle and it fills her like red wine, comfortable and warm, spreading from her lips into her fingertips. They pull apart and she can't stop the blush spreading across her face and Fritz smiles at the sight, rubbing her back.

"Pardon, Ma'am," the maid is standing in the archway of the dining room and Jo nods. "The Laurences are here. Shall I show them in or will you meet them in the hall?

And just like that Jo feels every inch of warmth sapped from her.

"We'll see them in, danke Mary." Fritz lets her go and follows the maid out. Jo is shaking but she follows without tripping a single step. Wringing her hands she tries to remember how to forge a smile like before everything had felt so natural until she hears her sister's voice and forgets how to breathe.

"Jo! Fritz! Oh Jo it's been so long!" Jo finds not only the Laurences but the Brookes and Marchs in the foyer hall and her youngest sister is pushing past them heading straight for Jo who is frozen to her spot.

"Goodness you've grown," she says over Jo's shoulder, embracing her strongly. "Fritz said the child had grown but I hardly imagined this." Amy pulls back to study her sister's swollen belly, awe and happiness across her young face. Fritz had of course told them about her pregnancy – it was only natural, she reassures herself but when she looks past Amy into the crowd of her family she sees a face that mirrors her own.

Laurie stands by the wall closest to the door, shock stamped across his face. He is holding a little girl who must be Bess.

Jo looks away fast.

Her mother comes to kiss her and everyone is greeted and welcomed in. Jo's boys waltz down and say their 'howdiedoos' before everyone shakes hands and congratulates the weather for what should be a wonderfully clear, crisp night. They move to the parlour in the back to watch the sunset over the trees in the fields beyond and Jo retreats to a chair in the corner.

Fritz pours some drinks and everyone catches up, sharing stories of Demi's good arm, Bess' first words and a great debate over the fastest of Jo's crowd. Jo is silent but she smiles quietly, watching her sisters navigate their families into order, their mother holding their father's hand, the tall dark form of her husband as he plays host. She has missed this, missed them and if she could not feel Laurie's stare beating into her from the opposite corner she might think everything perfect.

"Fritz," she calls him over. Her husband bends beside her, still carrying the tea, and listens. "Is there anything I can do?" Jo asks for she has the sudden desperate need to be busy. Laurie is still watching, her eyes flick over to his without her permission and she concentrates instead on the line of her husband's jaw 'neath his beard.

"No, dearest. Alles gut. Everyone is happy." He smiles, squeezing her hand briefly before he moves away with the teapot still in his hands.

Jo looks back to Laurie whose attention is momentarily on Bess whose hands seem to grab for everything. Amy sits closely beside him, her hand resting on the arm of his chair as her baby plays with her golden curls. The three of them are a complete picture, a complete family and an old ache starts in Jo's chest. This is the reason she has avoided them so well for almost a year and it fills her with righteousness. She has done the right thing.

She quickly looks away.

Mary pokes her head in, a hand on the door to the parlour. Jo sees her and nods, smiling her thanks. As soon as the woman disappears Jo stands, one hand on her belly as she announces, "The turkey's ready!"

…

Jo manages not to catch herself alone with anyone other than her husband during the Thanksgiving dinner. Everything goes smoothly though she can feel Laurie's gaze on her almost the whole time, she simply reaches for her husband's hand and when it comes time for farewells, Jo only waves instead of the old embraces and kisses. It hurts but everything is manageable and she sleeps well that night, knowing she has kept two families together.

Four weeks pass and it is time for Christmas at Orchard House. Her red dress is made of velvet and she wears tartan ribbons in her hair. Her husband is in his customary black suit and together they look quite presentable. Plumfield has had its Christmas morning and every boy has been spoilt with gifts this year so they are angels when it comes time to hand the reign of the house over to Mary and the older lads.

Fritz helps Jo into her side of the buggy seat, careful not to let his hands slip on the heavy material. The bottoms of her shoes are wet from the snow and it is difficult but they make do. It is only a short ride to Orchard House but Jo is shivering when they arrive and Mrs. March swiftly seats her daughter by the fire. They are the first of the three families to arrive and Jo savours this moment to prepare herself. She will be cordial but distant. She won't even have a chance to speak to Laurie.

The Brookes arrive next and their family mill around the sofa nearest to Beth's old piano, Meg trying hard not to let her children upset anything though they refuse to sit still. Daisy and Demi run over to Jo to feel her belly as they had at Thanksgiving and Demi so graciously declares, "It's bigger!" before Meg laughs and shushes him, calling him over to sit on her lap.

"I'm too big for that," he says but climbs atop regardless.

The Laurences arrive at last, unusually late and Jo tries not to hear them in the foyer as they enter.

"You should have thought of that yesterday, or two days ago, honestly Laurie it's _Christmas_. How could you even think of work at Christmas?" Amy's voice is quiet but Jo knows her sister's lecturing well enough.

"I told you –" Laurie begins but he is interrupted by Mr. March who offers to take their coats and hats. That is all Jo hears of their conversation before Brooke asks the Professor about the latest news from Germany and Meg blushes.

Fritz is still talking when the couple enter, Bess in Amy's arms, a crocheted bonnet on her little head. The Professor holds his conversation and everyone greets them with a "Merry Christmas!" which is quickly returned despite Amy's tight smile and Laurie's tired eyes.

All return to their seats and Jo carefully folds her hands, avoiding Laurie's eyes. His gaze has found her again and she can't show she is shaking, she knows they're having problems but that doesn't justify _anything._ It shouldn't, she pleads with herself, trying to drag her mind from the topic. Think of the fireplace, think of Daisy on her father's lap, think of Fritz so close by.

Jo takes her husbands hand and returns his soft smile.

Conversation begins again and Fritz is soon engaging Brooke with tales of his family and the latest ideas from Berlin. Meg is bouncing her boy on her knees and cooing at her niece beside her in Amy's arms.

"How are the little dears?" Amy asks Meg and they talk of babies and treasures. The little girl pulls at the lace frills that adorn her mother's neck, sucking on the fingers of her spare hand and Laurie sits beside them, oblivious. Jo has caught his gaze now and there is real danger when she realizes she can't look away.

This is their family; this is what they almost threw away.

Jo blinks slowly, following the line of his jaw, the scratchings of a beard beginning, the flattened collar of his Christmas clothes. He looks thin, thinner than normal and she wishes she didn't know the cause. She looks back up to his eyes, seeing he has measured the changes in her too. They are so black, so deep she might never be able to pull herself out of this.

"…Emily took that tansy," Jo's attention immediately centers on her sisters' conversation. It is soft and quiet as though they shouldn't even be talking of it. She would hear that word a mile away. "I don't understand how anyone could give up their baby just like that."

"There is no excuse, it is selfish and it is murder," Amy says decisively, whispering the final word for the children's sake. On what authority has she, Jo questions to herself, guilt battling with angry spite as her sister continues. "She'll never set foot inside a church again I suppose."

"I suppose not. I just wish there was something I could have said to make her stop. Oh, Amy I'm afraid I didn't do my Christian duty," Meg looks to her lap, running a hand over Demi's dark hair. "Do you think she's quite well?"

Jo stands suddenly, feeling as though the earth is rising up to meet her and swallow her in this sickened feeling. "Excuse me," she whispers for her oblivious husband's benefit and leaves the room on the tail of Amy's voice.

"It's Christmas and she's performed the greatest sin –" Jo never hears the end of Amy's sentence for she's reached the hall and her heartbeat is thundering in her ears.

"Oh God," she gasps, one hand against her belly, the other at her throat. It is as though she is choking down the pill once again and the ground is spinning infinitely beneath her. Her head feels like water and sick and it tips. "Oh God," she will faint.


	10. Chapter 10

He watches her leave so fast her husband has no time to react. Looking puzzled Bhaer continues to explain his father's obsession with Greek literature to Brooke who is none-the-wiser. Laurie's wife is still spilling judgment from her small painted mouth and for once, just once he wishes she'd see the people around her. He stands without an excuse and follows Jo.

He steps into the hall and sees her looking wildly at the floor, at the plant, at the picture frames of her family on the wall. Gently he shuts the door behind him and approaches her.

"Jo," Laurie's voice is thick behind her and she spins so fast she nearly knocks the potted plant off the end table beside her. He reaches for her just as she looks ready to fall and split her head open on the carpet runner.

"Te-" she tries to call his name but he can see her struggling to stand and breathe all at once so he holds her and she is clawing at his sleeves, his jacket, her feet are kicking to stand. "Teddy."

"I'm right here, Jo," he says, his voice by her ear and she grips him for dear life. "Shh," he says gently, running a thumb across her cheek. His fingers are wet and it is then they both realize she is crying. He pulls her closer and her head tucks itself in the crook of his shoulder. Jo's hands are tightly buried in his jacket and he wishes once more that his wife could see beyond herself.

For a long moment he just holds her.

"The worst bit," Jo says, her voice muffled by his jacket. "Is that they're right. Everything they've said is true."

Laurie wants to pull her away and shake some sense into her. It's Amy and Meg and baseless opinion but it's tearing her apart so he just holds her tighter. She thinks so little of herself and he can't help but think the world of her.

"How can they say-" she chokes.

"They didn't know," he says. His hand runs over the crown of her head and he feels her trying to rein in her emotions. It's in the little shudders of breath she takes, the way her hands are clenched against the fabric of his good shirt.

"I know that," she says a little angrily, pulling away from him. He feels cold. Of course she knows that, he could beat himself for saying otherwise. Jo takes to pacing up and down the carpet runner, her thin hands adjusting the pins in her hair with such practice he feels her sixteen-year-old self would blanch.

"Amy never told me you were pregnant," he blurts to break the heavy silence and instantly regrets it. Jo spins on her heel and gives him a long look and he feels as though he has run the knife his wife just held into Jo again.

"I didn't know until I saw you at Plumfield on Thanksgiving."

"How-" she starts and he knows the end is 'could you not' before it passes her lips. "I'm sorry," she says instead. The tight lines around her red eyes tell him more and he knows he has inadvertently hurt her. He just wishes he'd known.

"Has it really been that long?" Jo is watching the ground and he has to strain to hear her but the question catches somewhere inside his chest.

"Yes," Laurie answers and it is his turn for anger. She avoided seeing him for practically a year and time has been nothing to her! He'd waited; waited and hoped every day she might show up on their doorstep, a sister's basket in her hands and a smile made for him. It was a useless fancy and he'd known it the moment he conjured it but he'd waited, knowing it was up to her whether it was right to see him or not. "It has."

She looks as upset as he feels and the part of him that wanted to shout and run with her when they were younger is itching to burst free. "You couldn't spare a note?" he asks, forgetting why they were even in her mother's foyer. "No telegram?"

"I thought Amy would have said something," she returns and they both know what that means. That old spark is still there, crackling in the air between them and Laurie wants to wrench the door open and ask his wife why in God's name did she say one thing and not another.

Instead he takes a step towards Jo.

A hand immediately goes up in front of her and he stops in his tracks. "Then it is likely she said nothing about my being ill either." He feels the hot blood that had swarmed between his ears instantly fly to the ground. She'd been sick? Why hadn't Amy said any of this? "It has not been easy, but Fritz has helped me through it." She is looking towards the wall as though she can see through it to her husband and the coldness in him grows.

"I see." He does and it hurts. This is their reality and he has forgotten they are subject to it. He has a wife and a daughter and she has had nothing but that old man who must whisper foreign things to her in their old bed at night as he lies between her knees. The thought sickens him but it does not stop the clarity with which he imagines it.

If Amy had said something, anything of Jo's being over these long months he could have been there for her. He would have been the one to hold her, nurse her through whatever ailed her, and very probably she would not be so _pregnant_. So disgustingly grateful.

But then that was fantasy again.

These thoughts burn him though he feels like ice inside and Jo will not even look at him.

"I shouldn't have assumed. I should have said something myself." Jo is apologetic and he has forgotten how much they've grown. All his anger fades with her gaze and he feels like a damn fool. He's not the twenty-something boy full of headstrong passions and insults and impetuous romances. He is a husband, a businessman, a father and so much time has passed and he remembers lakes and Europe not skating and calling over the fence.

Everything is so complicated and yet so simple. He has a role to play and the evidence for it lies in Jo's belly right in front of him and he can hardly think. She loves her husband and he loves his daughter and they both must do what is right. The time for foolishness is over, has been over for more than a year and once again he will talk himself into being what he wishes most not to be.

"Never mind," he says quietly and moves to embrace her finally. His lips are against the top of her head and her hand has found his back. She holds him too in that very public room in Orchard House and for the first time he does not spare a thought to their being found. It is not how it used to be and yet they are still not who they must be but he lets go and tries to forget.

"I'm your brother Jo, I'll always understand," he holds out his hand, the other on the doorknob to the sitting room. Jo needs him to say these things, to be this person. She takes a moment, running her fingers across her eyes, trying hard to match his sad smile before she finally takes his hand and they re-enter as sister and brother.

It is the law.

…

He gives himself four days before he sits in their drawing room, index on his lip and legs crossed lazily. He is waiting for his wife to put their daughter to bed and pass through the room for her book before she heads to their bed. It isn't lightly that he has stirred himself into this mood, rehashing in his mind previous conversations on the same topic he will approach with her.

It very probably isn't right that he accuse her of certain things given the extent of his own sins, but he sits there and waits.

Laurie does not have to wait long before a golden head appears in the doorway and the sweep of her skirts stop as they hit the rug and drag. She is closing the handle behind her and does not see him, sitting in the darkest corner of the room, watching her. Her hands are so small, he thinks when she rests them on the breadth of her new dark blue skirt as she crosses half the length of the room.

At last she sees him. "My lord!" that same small hand flies to her chest. "What are you doing there in the dark?" Her hand falls back to her side and she gives him an odd look, as though he will never do what is expected and adult.

"Waiting for you, my lady." He says, though there isn't a trace of a smile on his face.

Something flickers across Amy's face but it is too quickly mastered under her cool reserve before he recognizes it. She moves towards him, instantly fussing about the light. She has never liked this corner of the room. He wonders if that is why he has chosen it. His wife stops beside him and fiddles with the gas lamp that will do no better at lighting the space, and finally he stretches out a hand and holds her wrist.

"Amy, please." She stops instantly and pulls away from the deficient object. Her skirt is touching his knee and yet she still feels so far away. "Tell me," Laurie begins and he sees her take a breath. "Why did you say nothing of Jo's pregnancy?"

There is no pause between his question and her answered sigh. Amy pulls her arm from his and presses her hands tight against the stiffness of her dress-front. She looks as though she is holding herself in, holding herself up though her face remains a still picture of an exhausted wife. As though she has done more than sung to her baby and added another layer of colour to her painting today. As though she cooks and cleans and scrubs and pricks at every insufferable stitch of their house.

"I've already told you, Laurie. I thought Marmee had." And she had told him that before. He'd lived with her long enough to know her half-truths.

"She didn't."

"Well then I honestly don't know what to say other than I'm sorry. Is that what you want to hear? I can't go back in time to tell you Laurie. I would if I could, but I can't so please stop torturing us both with this nonsense."

She sounds tired he thinks.

He should take her hand and squeeze it gently, apologise and take them both to bed but he can't. Even if she gives him the same answer to the same question all their days he doesn't know if he can ever forgive her.

He should have been told.

…

It is cold when he arrives at Plumfield, collar turned up and boots wet from the snow. He raps smartly on the kitchen door, surprised when Jo herself opens it. He spies her small hand rubbing against the mass of her belly and frowns as he steps in.

"The boys are playing that blasted violin and I can't fit in any of the cursed chairs anymore," Jo complains in way of greeting. Laurie drops his hat on the counter top and follows her waddling gait around the kitchen.

"Good day to you too! Really Jo I thought you'd be resting."

Jo spares a smile of the long-suffering for him, her hand still rubbing small circles over layers and layers of material.

"Hard to be comfortable this size don't you think?" Laurie smiles at her and there is a long moment before she turns away and he remembers who he is.

"Well then, how about a turn in the garden? It's a bit chilly but that's never stopped you before."

"I've never been –" Jo stops herself and he knows how she would finish it.

"Come on then," he says quickly and takes her arm, finding a cloak on the stand by the door. He wraps it around her shoulders and reclaims his hat as Jo buttons the cloak tight across her chest. They step outside and the air is crisp enough that he can actually feel it fill his lungs. Keeping a hand on Jo's back they set off only ankle deep in snow. This time they walk towards the woods instead of the field and he knows Jo is thankful when her eyes briefly meet his.

"How is Amy?" she asks. He takes a while to think of an answer.

Really he has barely spoken to her since Christmas, save their one repeated conversation over Jo's condition. Laurie has hidden in the study under the pretense of work and he thinks, reassuring himself, Amy hadn't exactly sought him out either.

"She's well," Laurie says at last. "Bess is crawling and making a mess of her parlour these days." He swallows at such a generalization of his family but Jo says nothing of it. Her eyes are trained on the thinning snow at their feet. They approach the tree-line and the ground hardens, feeling tacky underfoot.

"Does she know you've come?"

Laurie's step falters a little at that but he reminds himself he has nothing to feel guilty about – he has resolved to be only Jo's friend, her brother (at least he will have a part to play in her life) and Amy believes his role to be just that.

"I told her I was going out for a walk – and here we are," he gestures about them and tries not to feel a pang at the little lie. He had left a note; if his wife wanted him she would find it.

"It seems as though all Fritz does is give lessons sometimes," Jo changes the conversation and Laurie doesn't miss the mournful note in her tone for a moment.

"You really love him don't you?"

She is quiet after his soft question but she surprises them both when her hand slips into his.

"Yes, I do."

Laurie looks at the trees then and tries very hard to stop his vision from clouding. The moss on the trunks is green and slick and he absently wonders how long after winter it takes for them to dry. Jo's hand is still tight in his and they say nothing for a long while.

Eventually they slow their already snail-like pace and Laurie takes his hand back, putting it safely in his pocket. It feels as though there is moss in his throat.

"We're not lost are we?" Jo looks around the woods that now surround them fully and shakes her head 'no'.

"No, we're not far in. I know the way back." She stops when her gaze catches his and they stand in that old wood, Laurie with his hands in his pockets, Jo with hers on her stomach.

"Oh Teddy," she says, her eyes dropping to the forest floor. He knows the colour, it matches her hair in the shade of these pines. "He has helped me a great deal," Jo starts and he can see her working herself into a speech. "He is a good man, Teddy, a good man. And he cares and loves me – how can I not love him back? I carry his child – our child!"

Jo's cheeks are red and her eyes shine with frustration and guilt and any number of things he knows best she'd rather not feel.

"It shouldn't be a duty, Jo! You should love someone because you do, not because you owe them something. You don't owe him your love Jo." He punctuates his words, pointing where he thinks they've come.

"You don't understand, Laurie. He has done more for me than any other human being and I can't help it." She instantly regrets her choice of words and he knows it when she takes a step back, looking at him as though she is afraid of how he will take it.

She has nothing to fear from him.

"I told you this day would come." He says so quietly, but tears are filling her eyes. "So you'll live and die for him, Jo just as I said. And I'll-" But Laurie chokes on the end of his sentence so he does what he knows will hurt more than help and kisses her.

Jo's mouth opens a second later and as his tongue touches hers so gently he realizes it is more of a mistake than he was willing to commit. Jo's hand moves to his cheek, her thumb at his chin on that tiny mole Amy did so admire and his hand leaves his pocket heading straight for her waist. The sudden feeling of her swollen belly against his hard, flat one shocks them both and they pull apart, sensibility thrown over them like and icy bucket of water.

It is that moment too that Jo's face flickers like a switch.

"Oh!" Jo's hand flies to her stomach and though he is still breathing heavily from their kiss, Laurie is instantly concerned.

"Jo, what is it?" but he knows the answer when her face scrunches up in pain and she falls to her knees. Laurie drops down beside her, panic starting to fill him and he notices with a detached annoyance that his hands are shaking as he puts them on Jo's shoulders.

"Jo, are you okay?"

She twists her neck to look at him, a similar panic in her eyes. "Laurie it's – I – I feel wet." Laurie closes his eyes, he knows what this means.

"Okay," he says quietly, "okay, okay – can you stand?" Jo's eyes are filled with fear and she quickly shakes her head as she clamps her legs shut tight.

"Okay, okay –" he wishes he could stop saying that word. "Alright, can I lift you?"

Jo hesitates a moment, "Yes, if you can."

Laurie leaps to his feet and prays that this will work. He is strong, he is fit and he can do this. He bends and helps Jo to stand shakily, her right hand firmly planted on her belly. Her left arm is wrapped tightly around Laurie's neck and he counts them lucky she can move at all.

"Okay," that word again "alright, hold on, you ready? One, two, three!" A swift bend and he lifts Jo, sweeping her skirts and legs under his left arm.

"I got you," he says steadily, wondering silently just how far he was going to make it. "Which way?" Laurie asks and Jo raises her head to see before another fierce wave of pain makes her clench in his arms.

"Come on –" his voice is shaking now and he worries that she feels a little too hot for a woman in the middle of the woods in the middle of winter. "Jo."

"There," she gasps between deep breaths, pointing over his shoulder and Laurie spins, moving off as quick as he can. The rocks feel as hard as metal under his boots as he half-walks, half-runs, long legs carrying them both back to Plumfield. Twigs snap under his gait and he cringes when Jo exclaims in pain, her hands so tight against his neck.

He prays it wont take long, but every tree looks the same in their winter coats.

The trees soon begin to thin and he silently thanks the Almighty that they hadn't enough time to wander further in before Jo screams. He has never heard her make a sound anything like it before and she is yelling at him, "Put me down! Put me down!" He stops, so close to the fields now and lets her down as gently as he can though she is still in so much pain.

"Jo, we're so close now! Can you hold on for just a little longer?" Laurie crouches in the melting snow beside her as she tries to breath, her face contorted in agony. He sees the sweat on her forehead and pulls a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe it. Wisps of hair stick to her skin and she is concentrating so hard on breathing the pain away. "Jo –"

"Find Fritz!" she interrupts him, her hand strong and tight around his arm. He pulls his hand from her forehead and sits on his haunches looking at her like she's mad.

"I'm not going to leave you here by your self!"

"Get help!" she sounds desperate, gripping his arm, pale though she feels like fire. "I can't do this – not here."

Laurie can't move as she starts to cry, fingers digging into the mound of flesh that holds her child. For how much longer God only knows. He runs a shaky hand through his thick hair, torn between doing what she wants and staying beside her. She is in so much pain and now she's crying and he can't help any of it but he can bring her child into this world. He can, he convinces himself. Laurie can't leave her alone out here, he decides.

"Come on," he lifts her head up, looking straight into her eyes. "You _can_ do this Jo. We're going to bring your baby into the world."

"How?" Jo looks as though she'd rather anyone else to be the one doing it, and frankly he couldn't agree more but they had to make do. This child would come regardless of who was waiting to catch it.

"I took lessons in College," Laurie lies, taking his hands from her face to watch her belly instead. He tries desperately to recall everything his medical friends ever said about childbirth and hopes it is enough to get them through this. He looks up to see Jo staring past his shoulder sadly.

He turns and sees her house, two fields over it sits in the distance, far enough it would be hell to get to, but close enough to distinguish it.

"Sure you can't make it?" he asks again, turning back to her. Jo's eyes refocus on his and he reads a lot of fear and desperation, but there is determination. The same determination that lost her hair to pay for her mother's train ticket, the same determination that sent her to New York, the very same that married her to her Professor.

"Let's give it a go, shall we?" Laurie stands and scoops her arm about his neck, pulling her to her feet. She is holding her belly tight but her eyes soon fix on Plumfield.

"-Should never have gone out," Jo grits between her teeth and Laurie laughs.

"Well that's my fault I believe."

"Don't you forget it!"

It is slow going but they have made some progress. Only now they are without the protection of the trees and Laurie worries when Jo can barely take another step, the pain bending her form. The winter field is too exposed but there is nothing they can do except collapse to the ground.

His hands pull through his hair again and they both look out to where the house stands.

The snow has made Jo's dress sodden and she shakes with the cold. Her teeth start chattering and Laurie pulls his coat off, quickly unbuttoning her cloak. Jo watches him silently, her mouth a grim line as she follows his movements. He wonders why she isn't calling out like his wife had in such pain but he is grateful for small mercies. Her cloak is finally off and he helps her into his coat, noting the high fever of her skin as he pulls one arm through and then the other.

He lays her cloak out on the snow; thankful it is not as deep as it could be. Laurie helps her scoot over onto it and then he is done. There is nothing else he can do to make her comfortable. The air is cold without his coat and it is then he notices he has been sweating.

He runs his hand through his hair again and looks back to Plumfield.

"Laurie," Jo grabs his hand and he squeezes it tight. "Teddy, you have to go get them."

She looks up at him, eyes lidded heavily, her face damp with sweat and pain and although he thought he could never deny her anything he realizes he can. "I can't," Laurie says.

"You can," she says, her fingers trying to grip his hand just a little better. "You must."

"It's not possible. I can't! I can't leave you in the middle of this field to give birth while I'm off fetching your goddamn husband so don't ask me, Jo!"

She lets go of his hand and holds her belly again and he feels so sorry. He hadn't meant to shout or swear but there was no way he was leaving her out here in the open. What if something went wrong? And something was bound to go wrong at this point. Jo was far too hot and she hadn't stopped shaking since he put his jacket on her. He was not going to leave.

He sees her start to cry again and anger and hopelessness fill him. He has no idea what to do and no amount of pretending is going to help them. He can't help her but he can't leave her. He feels sick.

"I'm sorry," he says, scooting closer to hold her to him. Jo's forehead rests against his shoulder and she cries honestly now, her frame shaking and sobbing and he wishes for once he could do the same.

It was hopeless.

He holds her until she calms down, rubbing her back in large circles, remembering how it had helped when Beth caught with fever. He smiles briefly, recalling this kiss she gave him after that. He hadn't been able to think of anything but that kiss on the drive to the station that night and he can still recall the sensation. He thinks of Beth curled up on the sofa in the Marchs' sitting room, smiling at him as though she knew him best. He thinks of the piano his grandfather gave her, and then thinks of his grandfather. He hasn't seen him since the old fellow went to New York to take care of business. It should have been Laurie's job but the gentleman always could read more of his situation than he let on.

Laurie tries not to sigh. It was getting harder to think of anything else so that he wouldn't fall apart. Jo was breathing quieter now and though he was expecting her fingers to dig into his arms at any moment as another wave of pain crashed through her bones he held tight. He had to be strong for Jo.

"Oh!" and there it was, as though every other moment should be punctuated with her incredible hurt. It wasn't fair. Nothing about this was. Laurie keeps his arms about her, though hers go to her belly. "Oh, this is by far the worst," her teeth stop chattering to grind against each other and he looks down in deep concern.

"Help," she whispers pathetically when the pain passes. Laurie's hand goes to his hair but stops when Jo's expression changes so radically. He turns to see where she is looking and there! A field away he sees them – It is Fritz and four of the stronger lads running towards them.

"Jo!" he shouts to them though his voice is still faint. He looks down at her and sees she is crying, as they hear cries of "Mother Bhaer!" They are tears of joy this time and he doesn't stop his own two or three short drops as the boys outstrip the old Professor.

"What happened!?"

"The baby's coming," Laurie says as another wave hits Jo and she doubles over without his arms about her. The boys gather around and one of them carries a box of bandages and vinegar, two with the shabbiest stretcher Laurie has ever seen.

"The Professor was right," and the two eldest lay the stretcher beside Jo, moving around her. "Wait!" Laurie stops them, thinking he and the Professor should be the ones to lift her but Jo throws her arm out to him and nods at the boys. Everyone helps her onto it and it takes two of them on each side to lift the bed and head back to Plumfield. There is so much bustle and motion and Laurie feels as though he is caught in time watching them all move about her and start to head off.

"Friedrich!" Jo calls when the Professor finally meets them and he catches her hand immediately, whispering things to her in that calm German voice of his that only she will understand. Laurie stands there as they all move as fast as their strength allows.

He realizes it's cold as they reach the next field and he is still standing beside Jo's cloak on the snow. She has his jacket.

_A/N: well laurie tried deluding himself for a bit here again that he could just be jo's brother. All these characters lie to themselves! Oh well :S also sorry I haven't been really involved in the fandom these days guys, but I'm about to switch uni for the fourth time in three years so yeah, hectic!_


	11. Chapter 11

Her boots are caked in mud. Amy spares a look over her shoulder for the manservant who rode with her and watches as he circles the car around and rides back to the great iron gate she once feared so much as a girl. Looking back to the enormous house she steels her nerves and thinks of Bess, stepping inside only to hear her sister's scream echo down into the foyer.

Amy flinches, even as she unbuttons her cloak, hanging it alongside Jo's on the rack by the door. She came as quick as she could, leaving her baby with the nursemaid Laurie had insisted on employing for occasions such as these. She wonders how he happened to be here, at the right place at the right time as the note Jo's husband scrawled in haste seemed to imply. Amy fingers the folded piece of paper in the front pocket of her afternoon dress and hurries up the stairs.

Another scream fills the corridor before a door is slammed shut and she sees Laurie looking out a window at the far end. The Professor paces behind him, hands behind his back and she's never seen two men ignore such obvious tension before.

"I came as soon as I got your note," Amy says, eyes flicking between the two men. Not for the first time does she wonder why her husband hadn't been the one to send it.

"Thank you, sister." Fritz takes folds his hands around hers for a moment, his accent as thick as she ever heard it. His look tells her everything about Jo's condition and she feels as though the breath has gone out of her.

"It's not good." Laurie says, turning away from the window to meet her gaze. Fritz is pacing once again and she stands dumbfounded in the long hall, watching her husband lean against the window staring at the carpet runner.

"She'll be alright," Amy's voice holds none of its usual surety and she presses a hand to her chest. "Jo's always been the strongest. She'll be alright, I'm sure of it."

"She –" Laurie starts but something catches in his throat. Friedrich stops to watch their interaction. "She caught fever in the snow."

"The snow?"

"It's my fault."

"What was she doing in the _snow_?"

"We went walking. It's completely my fault."

Laurie looks broken and ghastly in the setting sun and Amy touches his arm. The maid had brought her his note just as she left and only now did any of it make sense. She swallows her first reaction, her true reaction and settles with comforting her husband.

The Professor says nothing and begins to pace again.

"It's my fault."

No one corrects him but Amy runs a gloved hand through the hair at the nape of his neck and he shudders, pushing his hands into his trouser pockets.

The door opens to the Bhaers' room and Hannah steps out, flushed and serious. Nobody asks what they all want to know and the old woman hurries past them with a pan of water stained the wrong sort of way. Amy watches as Laurie closes his eyes and the Professor starts to pace again.

…

Two hours later Laurie sits on the floor, his head in one hand. The Professor leans against the opposite wall watching the creeping twilight through the window above the younger man's head. Amy stands with a tray of pastries in her hands watching them both. Her husband looks like he will be sick and Jo's looks like he would rather be anywhere else.

Neither of them turn to her so she sets the tray on the floor between them and takes a small croissant, losing her appetite the minute Jo's wail fills the air. Amy can hear coughing and crying and she closes her eyes.

She doesn't remember any birth sounding like this.

Amy moves to stand beside her husband, an arms length away as she holds the croissant between her fingers, feeling the slick coating of grease from the buttery treat. The surface is papery and crumbles under the pressure of her thumb and she wishes she never even thought of tea.

Beside her Laurie stirs, running his hands through his hair, ignorant of the way it sticks out, mussed and tousled before he ducks his head and leans on his folded arms. Amy gracefully lowers herself beside him, careful that her skirt wont be caught under her feet. She reaches over him and smoothes his hair, letting her fingers caress the shell of his ear that peaks over his shoulder. He says nothing, doesn't move an inch and she feels irrationally cold.

The Professor shifts his weight against the wall and Amy looks up. His face is lined, the stress of the day imprinted across his skin and yet just now his expression holds something else. She cannot read it behind his glasses, but she thinks it might be pity. Understanding, knowingness but mostly pity.

Amy quickly shifts her attention back to her husband and when he still doesn't move she tosses her croissant back onto the tray and folds her hands. She isn't completely sure why he feels so responsible for the pain her sister is going through yet there is a part of her that knows. The things she has seen, the changes, the moods, the distance, the over-affection, every look and sigh she has collected for a year and a half all whisper to her that she knows just why Laurie should feel as he does.

She quickly clamps down that particular idea and settles her back against the wall.

It will be a long night.

…

One hour later the doctor steps out and the three in the hall watch him intently. He pulls a handkerchief out from his shirt pocket, wiping his forehead with a shaky hand. "Well, now." He sounds old and feeble and nothing like the man who helped Amy through her first miscarriage.

"How is she?" Fritz is the first to ask though Laurie is clambering to his feet. Amy waits for him to give her his hand but he steps towards the doctor, forgetting her. She pushes herself up, trying not trip on the skirt she so artfully arranged before.

"The fever – it is not good. I'm afraid her earlier pneumonia will affect the birth."

"This wouldn't have happened if I hadn't taken her out in the snow."

"Well now, son."

"No, it's true isn't it? It's her fever."

The doctor looks unsure for a moment, wiping his hands on his trouser legs, shifting his weight as Fritz looks away from Laurie to the wall he was leaning on moments ago. "It hasn't helped."

Laurie looks crushed by the man's diplomacy and the doctor nods to the three of them before disappearing back through the door. Friedrich sighs and stares at the wall, Laurie buries his face in his hands, hitting his head against the window as Amy sinks to the ground behind her pastries.

…

"What were you even doing out there?" Amy asks at last, unable to take the horrible silence that had settled ever since Jo's last terrible cry.

She can't help it. She has to know, deserves to know after so much pain and thinly veiled deception of his own feelings under their roof and now this – she has earned the right to hear the truth for once and know the whole story. It has frustrated her to no end to only see what he feels and hides and never hear anything but covers and read notes he leaves behind for her.

Friedrich turns around to face them for the first time since the doctor stepped out and they both wait for Laurie.

He tears his hand away from his forehead and looks up at the ceiling, leaning against the windowpane. His eyes close and Amy sees the dark circles underneath them as he breathes slowly. "Jo was going stir-crazy when I came by so I thought we'd go for a lark, like old times." Laurie's eyes open and he looks at Amy, black eyes glassy with regret. "Pretty stupid thing of me to do."

She watches wordlessly as his brow creases violently and his left hand returns to shield his eyes. The Professor's gaze drops to the carpet.

"In this weather at this time of the year. I should have known better but I – and now… I should have known better."

Amy wishes she could run into her room as she did as a child, shut the door and cry.

…

By ten o'clock Jo's cries sound tired and pathetically worn out. Amy thinks of her little girl and wonders if the nursemaid has had trouble putting her to sleep. Her head is on Laurie's shoulder but she doesn't dare take his hand. The Professor sits on a chair on of the boys brought an hour ago and he looks as still as the Grandfather clock at the other end of the corridor.

Amy's eyelids feel heavy in the candlelight and she struggles not to fall asleep on her husband, trying so hard not to hear Jo's struggle in the room two doors down. She tries to focus on Friedrich's hands, old fists that rest on his legs, tight and grey in the weak light.

A choked sound escapes the room and the three of them turn to look at the door it came from. Just as the doctor opens the heavy wooden door they hear Jo's voice sob "Marmee," and the Professor stands.

"You should all go in now, I think." There is no smile on the old man's face as he holds the door open, waiting for them. Laurie's hand grasps Amy and she watches his face as they stand together. He looks terrified and she wonders how she must look, the cold dead pit in her stomach like a peach stone.

The Professor enters first followed closely by Laurie who grips Amy's hand like a lifeline as they walk into the dark room. Jo lies in the centre of the bed, blankets so askew Amy would have thought her the rough-and-tough sleeper of fifteen were it not for the pallor on her thin face and the sweat staining her clothes and hair. She looks so exhausted but the smile on her face belies everything around her – it is a new smile and Amy can't take her eyes off her.

Fritz moves to stand beside the bed, taking Jo's hand in the same old grey fists Amy watched before. Jo's fingers clamp tight around his and she looks awful but happy in that brief moment. Laurie's hand tightens around hers and Amy doesn't think twice when she squeezes back.

She looks to her mother who stands on the other side of the bed, a small bundle of cloths and blankets in her arms as she bounces slightly from side to side. It is the baby, Amy realizes and instantly she wonders if it is a boy or a girl. Jo reaches for the baby with her spare hand and their mother sits on the bed, leaning over her.

"It's a boy," Jo mumbles tiredly, losing her grip on the Professor as she touches the baby in her mother's arms.

"You have a son," Marmee says as the Professor places a hand on the tiny child's head.

Amy looks at Laurie as Jo and Friedrich share a moment none of them can touch and she sees the relief across his face so clearly. She kisses his shoulder and presses her cheek to the spot, watching the family tableau silently. Jo's eyes are closing and Fritz' hand is on her shoulder as Marmee holds the child.

The doctor steps forward and places his hands on Fritz' back, whispering in his ear. The Professor pulls away from his family, looking at the shorter man intently for a moment. Amy watches as he stands again and follows the doctor out the door and understands why her mother is finding it so hard to smile.

She knows why Jo isn't holding the baby and why her mother can't take her eyes off her.

"No!" The sound of the Professor's exclamation on the other side of the door startles all of them and Amy watches her husband's face carefully. He will know now too. Laurie's eyes leave the door, skit across Jo's prone form until he looks back at Amy, confusion quickly being conquered.

"Jo," the Professor re-enters and settles himself beside her sister, kissing her hand as though he will never let it go. Laurie watches open-mouthed as Marmee stands and moves to the windows, passing the baby to Hannah who is crying quietly in the corner.

The doctor now stands in front of them and Amy holds her breath. She knows what he will say. "I'm sorry. Jo will not likely see the night through." She gasps for breath though it is just as she guessed. "I'm so sorry," He places a hand on Amy's arm and she feels like stone as he pat's her husband's shoulder. "I'm sorry son."

Laurie is just as still at her side. She sees him swallow just once as the doctor passes them by. His hand falls from hers and her gaze returns to Jo whose eyes struggle so hard to stay awake as her husband speaks so low to her.

Marmee crosses the room in long brisk strides, not stopping to say her goodbyes. Amy knows she is going for their father and feels the realization caught in her throat. She feels sick, she feels cold and she feels scared.

Amy moves to sit where her mother did before and takes Jo's hand. It is clammy and cold though the skin past her wrist is hot like the sheets over a coal pan. Jo turns her head against the pillow to smile vaguely up at her. Amy returns the smile though she feels as though her insides are made of ash. She tilts her head and watches Jo with that inane smile on her face, turning her sister's hand between her own two as she congratulates them both.

"He's beautiful," she says and looks over her shoulder at Hannah who sits in the rocking chair beside the crib, crying into one hand, the other safely around the newborn. The picture breaks Amy's heart and she quickly turns back to Jo, smile in place.

"Isn't he just. I'm so proud of my little boy."

Jo smiles so peacefully and tears fill Amy's eyes.

"What's wrong?" Jo asks, her thumb brushing her youngest sister's palm so tenderly. Amy takes a shuddering breath and continues to smile, though two tears have fallen down her cheek.

"Nothing. I'm just so happy for you, Jo."

Amy drops her sister's hand and moves quickly to the window, knowing she has never told a greater lie. Her sister is dying in that bed. Amy looks back over her shoulder and sees Laurie approaching Fritz. He looks so empty when the older gentleman stands and moves out of his way.

Friedrich walks around the bed, passes in front of her and kneels beside Hannah and the baby and Amy watches as he lowers his head and whispers to the baby in German.

Laurie sits beside Jo and moves to take her hand. Neither of them blink when he leaves it on her stomach instead and leans over her. Amy steps away from the window to see her sister's face as Laurie speaks so quietly to her.

"This is all my fault you know."

Jo's face cracks into the saddest of smiles before she breaks into the serious of looks. "No it's not. Not this time." Her hand moves to his shoulder, caressing the spot Amy kissed when they first entered the room and for the first time she feels nothing at the sight of her sister touching her husband. Laurie catches her hand and lifts it to his cheek, clutching at it like he will break without it.

"I shouldn't have come over and none of this would have happened."

"I would still have this baby and still have pneumonia, Teddy."

Amy watches as her husband sobs at his name, trying to move Jo's hand closer. Her fingers catch in the hair at his temple and Amy sees that she is crying too. "So you see? It isn't your fault at all."

Laurie's head ducks down and Amy has to blink rapidly, looking back out the window to the fields in the night. She hears her husband whisper and can't bring herself to look at them for what she will see will tear her into pieces. When she does look back Laurie's lips are pressed hard against the corner of Jo's mouth and she is crying in earnest. Laurie pulls back after a long moment where Amy feels like the world is caught in her throat.

Her hand is against her lips as she watches them both struggle to smile before she can't look at them anymore and turns to Fritz instead. His head is bent over his baby as Hannah buries her face in her hands and they wait for Mr March to arrive.

…

Jo slips quietly into the night with her husband at her side and her baby in her arms. Amy lets her tears fall silently in the parlour downstairs as she holds Laurie who keeps his head buried in the crook of her neck. She feels his wet tears run into the collar of her dress and shivers without the fire lit beside them.

His arms are around her and she has never felt so distant from a person. He cries for an hour with her until she is too tired to stand at two in the morning and they sit on her aunt's old sofas. Amy lays her head in his lap and falls asleep to the feeling of his hand smoothing her hair back from her face as he struggles to keep his steady breathing.

Later that morning the nursemaid brings Bess and stays for Jo's boy who cries long and hard for a mother that won't ever feed him. Their little girl reaches for her father to lift her but he doesn't see Bess until Amy seats her on his lap in the carriage home.

She plays with the ribbons in their girl's hair as Laurie keeps his eyes trained on the window, watching the countryside pass by as they rattle on towards home.

"She called him 'Teddy'," he rasps – the first words he has spoken since they left Jo's room twelve hours ago. "The Professor told me before we left."

Amy kisses Bess' head. There is no emotion in his voice but she knows what it means to him. She reaches in the space between them and takes his hand though it lies against hers like a dead weight. The girl stands on her father's lap and embraces him clumsily, pressing her face into his shirt. His right hand automatically presses against Bess' small back and he looks down into her blue eyes.

He smiles, just a little.

FIN.


End file.
